


Within The Reeds

by Ossified_Orange



Series: Monster Shorts [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Child Eren Yeager, Demon Levi (Shingeki no Kyojin), Gen, Halloween, Horror, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Levi/Eren Yeager-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:15:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26677288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ossified_Orange/pseuds/Ossified_Orange
Summary: ~Happy Halloween~This shall be a collection of short Monster stories, majority having Eren and Levi being the main characters (Some might not be relationship centric) from Attack on Titan.Short 1: Within The ReedsEren feels something watching him from the swampland by his house. What, or who, is it? And what do they want from him?
Relationships: Levi/Eren Yeager, Levi/Erwin Smith(past), Mikasa Ackerman/Jean Kirstein
Series: Monster Shorts [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1941136
Comments: 19
Kudos: 38





	1. Prologue: Мне присни́лся кошма́р – I had a nightmare.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time writing horror so I hope you all enjoy this story :)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for this story: Lynching, detailed death scenes, paranoia, detailed descriptions of bugs and dead bodies, violence, homophobia, (will add more as the story continues) Let me know if there is a trigger warning you would like added :)

# Within the Reeds

## Prologue:

### Мне присни́лся кошма́р – I had a nightmare.

Ma had always warned me of the mire. She’d told me of the creepies and the crawlies, and the ripples reflecting dragonflies that blinked with a thousand crocs eyes. She’d warned me of the mud, the muck; the marsh that would suck in your rubber boots and stick to your leg hairs, sticking you to the sinking ground like quick cement in a few seconds.

Still, my foot marched unwilling into the slough, where it wrapped and pulled at my legs as they sunk into the stinking mud, the reeking muck; the marsh that billowed water out where the earth swallowed my foot, a horrid squelching sound appearing as my body pushed on.

The seasons early hatched march-flies stuck to the clammy skin of my face, sweaty hair glued to my temples as the putrid, humid air cocooned me like a giant, heavy, wet, blanket. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here, where the wrinkled waves lapped at my waist as I trudged in deeper, watching as the stiff, smooth stalks of the reeds and cattails reached up towards the place where Kasa’s parents lived; the feathery clusters adhered to the tops of the stems fluttering in the wind as they extended out into the hovering grey sky.

Ma had especially warned me of the thick fog that would cling to the heavy breeze as it slowly made its way down the wetland, slowly creeping through the reeds as it stretched as far as the eye could see. She’d warned me of the directionless feeling that would sneak up into your mind, leading you astray before you’d gotten lost. She’d told me this was where strong men would weep, would wail; where they’d feed the starved reptiles with their plump flesh, where they’d feed the scaley crocodiles that watched them from the reeds.

My heavy lids peered through heavy lashes, watching unmoving, as a figure rose up through the mist, shrouding them in a dark, heavy cloak of air. Something bumped at my hip. Something bounced at my elbow.

The human sized puppet bobbed on the surface of the swampy water, staring at me with glassy sage green eyes and straw protruding from the eerily human-like ears that sat on a hastily sewn tan head with a deep, dark, flop of brown hair.

More appeared as I went deeper into the water, my chest filling with the tight feeling of pressure as the touch of sharp sticks and rough rocks left my feet; my boots were gone, my body protected only by the thin pale material of my pyjamas, the delicately embroidered bundles of flowering spurge soaking up the greens and the greys of the murky liquid, staining the silk beyond what I knew my Ma could repair.

The bodies surrounded me, their faces growing more realistic until I was flapping in the depths, my body fighting to stay afloat as I was enclosed in a wall of false me’s. Their eyes staring at me, unmoving. Dead. 

My eyes caught the figure as it lifted itself from the plants, it’s coat hanging from its shoulders, the hair an inky swirl of black on top of sickly pale skin, filthy from the mud and the muck that clung to the marshes weeds and it’s reeds and to the feet attached to my legs as they kicked against the feeling of slowly being dragged downwards.

The stranger turned towards me, it’s hands revealing themselves from the swirling shadows of its cape of mist. It reached a hand towards me. A sickly pale hand covered in earth. It reached this hand, this sickly pale hand of earth and swamp. It extended this limb that could barely hold itself against the weight of the heavy fog. The putrid fog. It reached from this fog and it reached for me. A hand covered in earth reached outwards and I closed my eyes against the feeling of water filling my lungs. My eyes opening to see a me. A second me. Standing at the foot of this thing. This thing with mud stuck to its pasty face. It’s pasty face that had a vile stretched mouth. A vile stretched mouth that opened and grinned as it’s bony fingers found purchase on the other me’s head of dripping brown hair.

I sank beneath the rank waves of algae filled swamp water and found myself floating, the fight in my limbs leaving as I grew so heavily tired. So tired. I could sleep. In this nice, warm water; I could sleep.

I watched as the eyes before me watched, waiting in tranquil stillness as the thin wisps of ebony hair splayed out in the water. The silver of its eyes gleaming at me in the darkness of the moor as I sank further. They shone in the light that danced through the shadows of reeds. They gleamed in the light of microscopic creatures that waltzed in my vision as my lids slowly closed.

They hungered in the last seconds of my fading sight.


	2. There was a storm, it unearthed a dream.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eren, 12, experiences the frightening sensation of being watched.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone,   
> Please let me know how the length feels, if you see any grammatical errors, or how you feel about the chapter :)

# Within The Reeds

### There was a storm, it unearthed a dream.

#### Part 1

His pale green eyes flicked upwards, the distant crack of thunder sending a short tremble up his spine. Frogs and cicadas croaked and wailed and whined as the wind blew bursts of rain on to the porch, large droplets landing on the small boys’ feet.

“Ma! Rain’s here,” his sister stood at the front door, a dainty hand lifted to her brows, peeking out into the darkness; the corner of her eyes caught the small figure of her younger brother crouching in the hazy blinking light as she’d gone to step back inside. The soft yellow lit his features as he stared out into the waving reeds of the swamp, her stench filling the land they lived on, where their house slowly sank, and the bugs nipped at their skin no matter how much spray they slathered themselves in.

“Eren, what’ya doing out there in the wet! You’re gonna catch a cold.” The boy peered up at her before looking back out into the marshes.

He didn’t return a reply but continued staring out into the water falling from the sky, hitting the ground with a wet plop as it joined the rest of the puddles building up around the house.

“Ya think pa’s gonna make it back in this rain Kasa?” his small words fell from small lips as they pouted and drooped, the disappointment wrinkling the tan skin of his nose and brows.

Her own mimicked his, but only in worry, “not likely, Sparkles. He’ll be back in the morn’, just in time for breakfast. Now come on in, you need to get out of those wet clothes before you catch something.” Her voice rose at the end, cracking in defiance of her accent. Eren watched his sister as she stood there, holding a handful of patterned tea-towels in one hand, her long ebony hair twisted into a plait down the side of her shoulder. A soft mimicry of their mother’s. Her eyes squinted at him through the flyscreen.

“Comin’,” he stood from his spot and attempted to wipe the water off his knees, the sandals on his feet squelching against the hard, creaking wood.

The wind chimes rang viciously in his rounded ears, their size blowing outwards from his head. He’d always been told he’d grow into them, so he waited and waited and gave up when he turned 10, relenting to the fact that his ears would forever give him the nickname “Erephant” that he’d been supplied with on his first day of pre-primary. That had been when he was five and he still hadn’t grown into them. The chimes blew harder, the breeze picking up as it slammed against the side of the house, catching him in the face as he walked towards his sister.

He rubbed the drops from his eyes and off his forehead, looking out into the downpour as the wind died down with his gaze. He caught the glint of something bright and glowing, a silver strip of space out between the tall strands of grass before it disappeared into the water cascading down from the clouds.

“C’mon, inside.”

He nodded and marched over the threshold, removing his sandals at the door; his small steps leaving a trail of pools through the house.

“Eren! You clean this up after you’re done!”

He continued his march up into the upper story bathroom, the wooden floors bending under the light weight of his body as his feet slapped against the timber.

Flicking on the light, he grabbed a towel hastily off the rack and threw it onto the counter beside the sink. Padding across the hallway into his bedroom in the dim light of the upper story, he reefed through his drawers to find his pyjama’s. Eren liked these ones. They were hand-sewn by his nanna, a bit scruffy but covered in the little bundles of white flowers that grew beside the drainpipe on the outside of his home. Kasa had called them a flowering spurge a couple times. The ends of his sleeves had twists of reeds embroidered into the soft, pale green silk. His ma made sure he took care of them, and Kasa had promised to teach him how to fix frays and tears when he was bigger.

He held them gingerly away from his wet chest, moving quickly from his room to the stair’s balustrade.

“Ma! I’m havin’ a bath before dinner!”

Down the stairs, his mother worked over the steaming stove, stirring together the mincemeat and onions, only moving her neck slightly to ask her eldest what he’d yelled out to them.

“Bath time ma, he said he’s havin’ a bath.”

Eren closed the bathroom door softly, distractedly playing with a spot on the white wood where a large splinter had fallen out before turning to the bathroom counter, placing down his clothes, and running the bathwater.

As the youngest of the house, he’d always been coddled.

Being the stubborn headed child he knew he was, he decided he’d take up housework to prove them all wrong. Just because he was young didn’t mean he wasn’t able.

He’d been proud of himself after he’d taken a bath without the help of someone else. There was always a heavy fear that rested on the household whenever Eren tried to go near water. Baths, lakes, the onetime they’d gone to the beach; especially the swamp. He wasn’t allowed near the murky depths outside his house, even with supervision.

Kasa had told him the story once, whispering the tale of when he was a toddler and he’d gotten too far out into the swamp. He’d been young enough that he hadn’t filed away the memory, but he still remembered the feeling of the dense water filling his lungs. He’d been playing in the mud of the marsh, ripping out weeds and squishing the buzzing bugs as they swooped by him. Kasa said that her and his Ma had been keeping a close eye on him when they’d stupidly gotten lost in conversation. He’d vanished. Gone. They called and they searched, but they only found the small shoe from his foot stuck in the mud where he’d been playing minutes earlier.

The bubbles had given him away, floating above the surface in rapid succession as he slipped, unheard, beneath the murk.

So his pride in being able to have a bath in solitude was well deserved, in his mind, after being fretted over for his 12 years of living. In his extra defence, he enjoyed the routine.

Eren pulled out the plastic stool from the cabinet and placed it in front of the sink, ready for him after his bath for when he brushed his teeth. He turned the tap and felt the water, waiting for it to warm up before slipping the plug in.

Ma had drawn a line on the bath for where he could fill it to. If he wanted to bathe by himself, he had to follow all of the rules put in place by his Ma.

Stepping into the tub, he listened as he heard the wind chimes outside, tinkling and tinging as the wind picked up and whipped around the house, blowing through the roof, and causing the house to rattle at its foundations. He went through the motions, using the washcloth for his skin, the warm water flowing over him before he moved onto his hair.

The brown locks were already damp from the rain, but he ducked his head under the tepid water anyway and then rubbed it from his face to grab the shampoo. Pushing it through the strands of his hair, he squeezed his eyes shut to stop the soapy liquid from burning them.

Feeling the suds bubble and burst beneath his fingers as he scrubbed and scratched at his scalp, he could feel the chilly temperature from the outside storm fighting against the warmth the houses radiator struggled to create in the usual humid climate.

Eren had always carried the feeling of being watched. It was a skin prickling tingle that raised the hairs on his arms and neck and caused him to slip beneath the covers of his bed. He’d never enjoyed the feeling. Kasa had laughed at him for wanting to bathe in his bathers when he’d told her, her grin showing widely as she pointed at the window.

“Nothin’ to worry about Sparkles. Nothin’s watching you from up here.”

But here he sat, the touch of eyes on him as he rinsed the suds from his hair. Speedily, hurrying to finish the bath so he could encase himself in the soft cotton of a towel.

He had a loofa crushed in one of his palm’s, scrubbing at the greasy skin of his arms when he felt a cool breeze flutter through the window. Icy water spread out from the sides of the bath, cornering Eren in the middle of the tub. A gasp left his chapped lips. Jumping from the bath, he stepped on to the mat with a hop. He reached for the towel so fast that he knocked the soap dish off of the counter. It smashed against the porcelain of the bathtub and he watched as the shards sunk beneath the bubbly water, the rest falling onto the wet tiles.

A distressed knock sounded at the fragile door, his sister’s muffled voice calling from the hallway.

“Eren, are you alright?”

He wrapped the towel around his shoulders and opened the chipped white door, letting Mikasa in and pulling himself inwards to escape the chill running down his body.

“I-it… the water… it became r-really cold,” teeth chattering against each other, he watched as she leant down. Dipping a slender hand into the water, her brows furrowed as she looked back up at him.

“Eren… it’s still warm sweetie.” Her lips dipped in a frown, pulling him closer as he shivered.

“Let’s get you dressed, yeah? Then we can watch a movie later? Popcorn?” As she spoke, she grinned and kissing the palm of his hand, stood, and helped him get into the pair of silken pyjamas that sat beside the sink.

He gave one last look to the bathroom and then up to the closed window, the lock snuggled in its place.

_How’d the breeze get in?_

#### Part 2

He carried the plates, from the kitchen to the table. Their porcelain backs clinking against the hard wood of a crudely carved jarrah wood frame. It had been a gift, his Ma had said, from an old man down the way. He’d lived in a big old house, where the wind whispered and sung through cracked windowpanes and the reeds had refashioned themselves into vines that grew and grew. They had usurped the house from its bricks and its beams.

Ma said he’d been taken by the marsh. Eren thought he was just a crazy old man. Maybe they were both right.

Spaghetti was piled high on top of the plates, the delicate trail of blue flowers covered by heaves of tomato, mince, onion, and the pasta itself. The smell of tomatoes was overwhelming. It filled the room and placed itself gently on every crevice; so, no matter where he was, Eren could smell the stench of rich tomato paste.

The air felt heavy around the table, where forks rattled against plates and the sounds of chewing grated against Eren’s ears.

A whistling breeze blew against the house, leftover remnants of the storm that had raged against the marshes as Eren had watched, watching the cracks of lightning as they split the sky into pieces that dropped into his ears as a resounding clap of thunder that shook the very dirt of the earth.

The thump, thump, thump, of the world’s heartbeat still beat against the sides of Eren’s head, sitting in his temples as the beginnings of a headache formed.

His fork pushed against the pasta, playing, and twisting with strands that he never lifted to his lips.

“What’s wrong Eren?” Mikasa had paused, watching him when he looked up to her.

“I don’t think I feel very hungry right now Kasa, can we watch some movies now?”

His Ma had one thinning, brown brow raised, “Movies? K, he’s got school tomorrow. Are you gonna be puttin’ him to bed?”

She nodded her head, twirling the pasta around her fork and shoving it into her mouth, chewing around the fist-worth of noodles.

“Oh, right. Ma. What’re we gonna do for Eren’s birthday? It’s coming up in a couple weeks.” She turned towards him, her long silky black hair trailing over her shoulder in its plait. “You wanna little party, Sparkles?” Mikasa had whipped her head in their ma’s direction, the silver of her eyes pressing into the older woman, flicking down to her younger sibling before looking back up to Carla as she put her utensils down.

Eren looked at her as well, the short lengths of his fingers clenched around the thin metal, his other hand crumpling itself into the silk of his pyjamas.

“Are you sure Eren? It didn’t go so well last year; what with that Springer boy actin’ the way he did.”

Kasa chuckled a little, “I heard from Jean that his little friend Sasha tried to run off with the plate of party pies.”

“That’s cause she hasn’t got no food at hers Kasa, she was takin’ them to her pa.” He chimed in, placing his fork on top of the pasta that had been massacred across his plate.

Mikasa’s expression soured, her lips sucking inwards as she stared into her plate, searching for an answer, or a retaliation.

“Well,” His Ma spoke up, “as long as everyone behaves, we can throw a small get together. And Eren?”

Eren looked up at her expectantly, wondering what she was going to say. Especially with the strange look she had given him.

“If Sasha needs some food packed for her Pa, just let me know and I’ll put some away in a Tupperware.”

He nodded vigorously at her, his head bobbing up and down as a grin spread across his lips.

With dinner over, dishes done and popcorn sitting in a navy-blue bowl in his lap, Eren bounced on the cushion he was sat on; his small hands grabbing at the small white puffs and shoving them down his throat.

Mikasa had just fallen hard into the couch with one hand hovering over the remote as she looked to see if there were any movies on worth watching before perusing the files of burnt discs, they kept in the cabinet beneath the tv.

“How do you feel about Brothers Grimm, Sparkles? Y’know, the one with Heath Ledger?”

Eren let out a loud “Oh!” before nodding around another handful of popcorn; his sister pressed play on the remote and then tucked her legs beneath her. The trackies keeping her warm before she lifted a knitted throw blanket over her, a second throw being wrapped around Eren as their Ma came up behind him. She left a gentle peck on his forehead and then moved to Mikasa, doing the same with a soft hold to her chin.

Eren was enraptured by the film, his focus broken only by the adverts playing, where he’d jump up from the couch and bolt down the hall for a toilet break.

He had felt the prickling sensation of eyes watching him since he’d left the bathroom earlier, only stopping during dinner, where he’d picked at his food. Anxious for the return of the staring gaze.

Now the ever-watchful sensation had come back, sending goosebumps over his shoulders and down his arms, raising the hairs as he re-joined his sister and huddled against her side; Her breath was rising and falling softly, and her eyes were closed.

He could feel the eyes observing him from the window, the strength behind its glare shoving its way through the glass panels and into the room with him. Staring him down as it stood over him.

Eren gulped, refusing to look at the window as the thing continued its ogling. Eyes shut tight against his sisters arm as he felt the feeling of something closing the distance between him, and them.

A hand grabbed at his arm and his eyes burst open to his sister, beginning to gently lift him from the couch and take him upstairs.

“Hey, Sparkles, looks like we fell asleep.”

Later that night, Eren sat in bed, huddled beneath crisp covers, and drowned in pillows. The squishy prison he’d created for himself felt like a barrier between him and it. Whatever it was that was currently looking in at him from his upper story window.

He refused to look up, glaring diligently at his blankets and at his hands, picking at the skin around his fingers as his toes curled into the sheets.

Without changing the direction of his gaze, he stepped down off the bed, feet slipping into prepared slippers as he hastily stepped away from the bed; Just in case something reached out from the deep shadows to curl around his ankles.

Slipping down the dark hall, down the sloping stairs, and into the kitchen, he walked past the bench and the sink and a bouquet sitting in a jug on the island countertop and opened the fridge door, his small hands grabbing at a dented juice carton.

He went over his usual kitchen routine. Place the things he needed onto the bench, in this case: juice, glass, and a tea-towel in case he spilled some. Pull out his stool from beneath the sink and place it where he needed it, in this case, at the kitchen island that faced out into the open plan dining area, living room, and reading nook. The stairwell going to the upper story sat to the right of the kitchen, where he was standing on the stool, steadily tipping the juice into his cup.

He can hear the light sprinkling of rain tapping against the window as he puts the juice back down and spins the lid on tight. As he places it back into its place in the kitchen door, he hears an odder tapping noise on the porch. Eren’s mind went immediately to the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Their sharp, clicking claws rapping against the floor as they stalked the rotting wood of his porch.

Eren’s head fell into the abyssal depths of dinosaurs and reptiles, their scaly skins and rustling feathers scratching at the squishy confines of his brain. The tapping grew louder. Eren’s eyes watched the door, their glassy surface gravitating to the window, where nothing but darkness and stars peeked back at him.

His feet slapped against the hardwood floor as he pattered towards the door, the sound stopping abruptly as he stood before it. With his juice pressed against his chest, his fingers found the handle. They twisted it down and he heard the deadbolt click out of place. The heavy wooden door swung open with a creak and a crack, the sound echoing out into the swamp and the dark recesses of the house. He peeked through the flyscreen, he peered out into the night. Nothing looked back at him.

His fingers reached up to open the security door to see further into the gentle drizzle and the thickening fog of the darkening night-time marsh; a feeling, a tingling sensation that crept up through the bones in his legs and tickled up his spine and up, up, up into the base of his skull. The thing had seen him. It’s eyes slammed onto him, trapping him in the doorframe like he was a deer caught in the spotlights of a vehicle. Speeding. Running. It streaked over the road and through the reeds and its slimy, algae covered toes tapped at the porch stairs.

Eren slammed the wooden door shut. The deadbolt clicking back into place as he twisted the lock.

He stood there, frozen; his cup pressed into his chest, as it heaved and breathed so heavily, he almost didn’t catch the haggard breathing on the other side of the door.

His lungs stole his air as he stopped and listened to the gasps that guzzled up the night breeze and syphoned them into sickened lungs that choked with each breath. His feet stepped back, moving on their own as he made his way past the island, past the dining table, past the lively white flowers sprouting from the jug-turned-vase they had been shoved into, their petals turning ethereal in the glittering moonlight that showered over the kitchen as he sped along the planks that made up the floor, that made up the stairs, that made up the creaking house that bent and shrunk around him.

His slippered feet scuffed and scratched against the wood as he jumped up the staircase, the itch of insects crawling up his arms and he scratched and scratched at it. The feeling didn’t leave until he had made his way into Mikasa’s room, her back facing him as he placed his cup quietly on her nightstand. He slipped beneath the warm covers and clutched to her back that rose and fell with each of her breaths. He hoped that the image of velociraptors and the sound of retched, strangled lungs would leave his ears and his mind. That come the morning, a beautiful Saturday would appear, with its blinding sun sending the monsters on their way. 

But, if there was one thing Eren had learned from his short, almost thirteen years of life; it would be that nothing ever turned out how you wanted it to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this chapter :)  
> Thank you for reading


	3. It's Shadow Crawled and Crept

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eren sees what has been watching him. But not really.

# Within The Reeds

### It’s Shadow Crawled and Crept.

#### Part 1

The porridge.

It slipped, slopped, and slid off of the spoon with the hefty weight of goo, similar to the one they’d been making in science. It threw itself back into the bowl with a loud, wet, plop that caused Eren’s face to curl and cringe, the spoon dropping from his fingers and smacking the soggy surface of the glop.

Eren had waltzed down the stairs in the soft light of the early sun, wrapped in a warm cocoon of blankets that pooled around his shoulders. His croaking voice had grumbled under his breath about loud noises and distinct smells as he sat himself at one of the hard kitchen stools and scowled at the bench. He wore the effects of inadequate sleep in heavy bags that hung from his eyes and splotchy skin that shone through his usual summer tan.

He glared at the table and he glared at the glass jug that held a shrivelling bouquet of dying flowering spurge that sat atop the kitchen countertop, the petals falling onto the surface as they browned and crinkled. The water had turned yellow, and the droopy green stems sagged.

His hand reached up to grab at his spoon that dug holes into the bowl of oats that scowled at him as he tucked into the muck that barely passed as edible. 

As the cool metal of the spoon touched his tongue once again, a whispering breeze drifted in from the back of the house. It swooned and swung and muttered against the shell of his ear when it reached him. The back door was sat wide open and whistling in the wind. Eren felt more than heard, as this wind swept upwards and ruffled the blankets he was encased in, fluttering the oily strands of his hair as he was sat slouching on the stool and listening as it brushed dry, crackling leaves against the backyard pavers.

As his lips closed around the oats, a whisper started licking at the edges of his ear. It crept around him until a sudden shout jumped him from behind his neck. The feeling of breath tickling at the rising hairs as it’s teeth ground and smashed out the word he’d heard all his life.

“Eren!”

It was the warped sound of an older man’s voice that had called; the warped gargle of a megaphone that shot in from long distances and raised the prickling goosebumps up the lengths of his pencil-like arms and legs. He’d been hearing this yell since he awoke, the yell grabbing him from his sleep and ripping him from his dreams. His spoon clattered onto the kitchen bench as the heavy front door slammed open and the yelp of his Ma’s sudden shock from the loud noise echoed over the dining area from the porch as she spilled brown, steaming coffee onto her lap.

He heard the security door as it slipped closed behind her, her steps tiptoeing behind him as she wiped at her pants with a furious hand, a wrinkle in the skin of her forehead pushing at her brows.

Eren’s mother was a lean woman, standing just below most of the cabinets that nestled into the wall above her head. A plait of silken brown hair was laying on her back as she dropped her mug into the sink with a sharp clinking and clattering against the dry metal. Her pensive eyes gravitated to the small figure huddled against the kitchen bench. A spoon lifted from a hand that plunged it down into the bowl of porridge and then down into the shadowy cave system that had been created in an attempt to battle the chill that had shaken him when he was jumped awake that morning.

The chomp of his teeth against the spoon had his Ma tightening her eyebrows in displeasured worry as her fingers loosened their hold on the material of her slightly warm and damp pants.

“You ‘right hon’?” Her voice was calming, soft, drowning out the ringing in his ears and cradling his brain in velvety softness as she fluttered over the tiles and stroked his hair with a dainty hand, pushing it out of his eyes.

“Yeah Ma, just slept bad,”

The throat of the small boy croaked out a reply with a voice too exhausted for someone his age, where others were overflowing in bounds of energy.

As she opened her mouth to create more words, Mikasa walked past Eren and ruffled the short brown tendrils of his greasy hair.

Eren watched her as she left. The way her hand grabbed at the red scarf that hung by a hook on the wall. The way her hair twisted and flicked around once the outside breeze grabbed at it. Ma made a comment on the unseasonable weather, as they were meant to be in the middle of the wet season, a time for humidity, cyclones, and monsoonal rains.

But this weather had started like the dry season, where the nights and mornings chilled over and a swift breeze knocked away the harsh effects of the sun.

His eyes glazed over as he thought of the weather.

The sound of a long procession of loud, detailed, cursing came from the front of the house. Mikasa’s voice being heard over the static of the radio Ma had put on as she’d made her first mug of bitter, black coffee. 

Wiping her hands on the tea-towel that had been carelessly thrown on the counter, Ma hurried out of the house, barely sparing Eren a look as he played with his food. His eyes homed in on the tea-towel, taking in the stitchwork at the bottom of olives lazily crawling along a thick hemline.

Giving up on eating more, Eren slipped off of the stool and shuffled towards the front entrance, the blanket still wrapped tightly around his shoulders.

“It ain’t startin’ Ma! You smacking it ain’t gonna make it turnover”

“Well what else am I meant to do? I don’t know nothin’ bout cars” Ma’s puzzled voice grumbled over the sound of Mikasa as she whined and cried and placed her hand in one hand, the other shoved unceremoniously into her hip. 

The sound of another cars engine bumbled across the high tops of the reeds, the breeze making their feathery stems flitter and dance. The second car pulled up on the gravel drive, its owner, a wiry older man with long brown hair, stepped from the front seat, the warm wind picking up any stray hairs that flew around his face as the sun glinted from the circle lenses that sat atop his nose.

A gentle voice left the man’s thin lips; Soft, affable, his deft hands lifted to push the hair that had stuck itself to his face.

“What’s going on? Morning Carla,” he left a tender kiss on her cheek before moving to Mikasa and leaving a quick peck on her tense forehead.

“You’ll get wrinkles. Car troubles?”

Both of the despondent women nodded glumly, arms crossed over their chests as they stared into the maze of the car’s engine.

“I’m afraid I won’t be of any help; I can only perform surgeries on people.” Eren’s father, Grisha, was a respectable and well-known surgeon in their small town. Jumping up the steps, his long legs carried him towards the houses threshold before his eyes landed on Eren hidden behind the mesh of the security door.

“Morning Eren, how’d you guys fair with the storm last night?”

Eren peeked up into the thick lenses and rasped out a short, “we lived Pa, if anything ‘appened I woulda stepped in.”

The door creaked open and a large hand reached into his blanket shield and ruffled his hair. For the third time that morning.

“Of course, of course.” A dry laugh trickled from his throat as he stepped over the threshold and into the kitchen.

“He was waitin’ on the porch half the night for ya, sweetheart!”

Eren bumbled out of the house and down the porch stairs before he could hear the reply to his ma’s shoutings. His hands grabbing at the blankets to make sure they didn’t fall into the mud.

“Eren! Get back up on that porch, you’re still in your pyjamas!”

His feet stopped before backtracking back up onto the porch and over to the corner where he slumped into the old seat that swung as his toes brushed against the gently splintering wood.

A third car came roaring through the swamp and stopped with a growl behind Mikasa’s car and beside Grisha’s, Eren’s dads’.

“Jean.” The bitter word bit at his tongue as he spat it out against the balustrade.

“Good morning everyone,” a large Cheshire smile scribbled itself onto the pompous head of a stretched-out man with a puffed-out chest.

“Carla, Kitty… Eren.” A peck for his Ma’s cheek, a kiss to his sister’s lips, and a nod in the general direction of the small boy drowning in blankets, swinging angrily on a creaking chair that tipped slightly when he went too hard.

Eren gathered the saliva in his mouth, swished it around a bit and spat it out on the porch boards as he planted his feet.

“Eren! You do not spit in this family, do that again and I’ll send ya to bed with a hidin’.”

He slipped an apology from his lips before glaring at the smirk pulling at Jean’s face.

“It’s alright, Carla, he’s just a kid.”

He jumped up from the chair and stomped back into the house, a trail of dirt behind him as he continued his heavy-footed march back into the kitchen and threw himself onto the stool. His porridge was cold. 

A jean clad leg slid itself smoothly onto the stool beside him.

“Your Ma isn’t going to be happy about all that dirt, Eren.”

The blankets had slipped from his shoulders and were now a heaped pile wrapped around his seat. His elbows were implanted on the bench, fists stuffed into his chin as he watched a fly buzz around his food before landing on the rocky surface of the porridge.

He watched as its furry little hands rubbed together, the tube protruding from its face moving around like an opposable thumb.

“Eren?”

His name called from a distance, wrapping around his brain like plastic wrap that looped and folded until he no longer had use of a skull, or of his skin. It could be pulled from his organs and he would still have the shape of his face sat on top of his shoulders. It would be made of the crinkly wrapped surface of tangled plastic.

Another word was said but according to his ears, he didn’t speak the language it was trying to say to him. He continued to watch the fly.

It’s hooked hands continued to scratch at the other, rubbing over its head and through its other spiny spikes of hair that covered the rest of its body. It’s hundreds of eyes peered into him, growing bigger and smaller as all of his focus was poured onto it. 

It’s mouth opened into a familiar manic grin, hundreds of teeth growing up from its throat like a shark, to meet pale lips that’s breath stank of the murky water it had swallowed.

The grin puckered to form a word, only one.

“Eren.”

He jumped when a hand clapped onto his shoulder with a thump. Jean stood behind him with a strange look on his face as he stared into the glazed eyes of the smaller boy. He had planned to mess around with Mikasa’s kid brother, but he already seemed shaken up.

“Come on buddy, I’m gonna take you and your sister to the shop cause her car isn’t working at the moment… be ready in ten okay?” Jean’s voice had become softer as he looked into eyes that peeked vacantly up at him. From Jean’s eyes, it looked like the lights were on, but no one was home.

As Eren picked himself up and crawled away from the kitchen with a hunched back and slow, lethargic shuffles, Jean met Mikasa’s worried eyes and ran his fingers through the stray hairs that had come out of the plait.

Her lips pouted as she watched the space Eren had been, where the mud had ended, and small crumbs of earth had followed after.

“He’s been actin’ real strange since yesterday, Jean. We’ve tied our best not to react too much but it’s becomin’ a worry.”

“It’ll be alright kit-kat, he’s an emotional, growing, pre-teen with anger issues and a big head, there’s bound to be something strange about him.”

Her head nodded but her soft grey eyes continued to be plagued with unease.

“Also, I had a look at your car. How the fuck did you guys get that much mud in the fuel tank?”

Her brows narrowed at him and her lips began to form words, when Eren came bounding down a few moments later in something that definitely wasn’t pyjamas. Jean and Mikasa sent each other a look, before they picked up their bags and jumped into Jean’s great big Hilux and zoomed off through the tunnels of reeds.

Eren watched the plants as they loomed up beside the car, their stems moving like thousands of thin, bony, arms that waved like they were in a concert performing just for them. Throwing chants and whispers at the car as it bounced over rocks and dipped into muddy crevices in the gravel road.

He could feel the eyes before he tried to search for them. His own landed on spots in the reeds where the shadows drew together, the speed of the car making all of the flora blend together until it was a blur. A blur with a dark stain growing blacker and blacker until the figure of a person was standing there. Staring at him; unmoving.

He didn’t notice they’d left the reeds and the swamp until they were pulling into the parking lot of the dreary shopping centre, the image of the person branded onto his mind was all he could see.

#### Part 2

They stepped through the automatic glass doors and into the LED illuminated building and began strolling through the aisles. Eren still in a trance behind the couple as his brain tried to play catch up with his location.

As he walked around corners and slid down the hallways, his eyes constantly darted between the shelves. His head was on a constant swivel as his peripheral vision screamed urgently that there was something there. It invented shadowy figures and piercing silver eyes that yanked him from his dream-like state, and straight back into reality where his paranoia built itself around him like a snake that had constricted itself tightly around his body.

The tightening of his chest roped around him as he wandered down the empty aisles. He stopped in his tracks. The aisles were empty.

The lights flickered above him, beckoning him forward as he crept along, arms curled anxiously at his chest.

He could hear the soft mutterings of Mikasa and Jean’s voices, drifting over the aisle tops as though they were speaking in a phone. The crackling of the receiver sent shivers down his spine as he took another couple of steps forward. He had almost neared the end of the aisle.

He peeked through the slits in the shelves backs, looking through the translucent bottles of water to see if he could spot anyone else in the store.

As though his eyes were finally coming into focus, the misty figure of a shadow came into step with him from the aisle to his right. Sticking close to the shelf unit by his left, he watched as the thing slumped along, its feet sounded wet and bare against the linoleum of the store. Slap, slap, slap; its feet slapped, smacked, and scraped the floor as its figure hunched over. The only words Eren could conjure to describe the thing was that it looked as though he were peeking at it through frosted glass. It had no features on its face, but the outline was there. A sharp nose stuck out from what would have been it’s face; his stature leered over Eren, but wasn’t quite as tall as Jean or Mikasa, it might’ve been the same height as his ma.

His own feet scuffed the floor as he stepped forward again, his eyes shifting to the end of the aisle before moving back to the shadow. He watched as it kept pace with him, never looking in any other direction but down at the floor.

The smell hit him then, and he recoiled, lifting his thin pear green shirt to cover his nose. The stench reminded him of a memory of the last year, around Easter, when he had woken to a bittersweet stink that wafted from below his bed. It had come from the small dead carcass of a rat. It’s muscles stiff and cold when he had reached to grab it. It was dead.

This thing was dead. It had followed him from the marsh, and it had made its bed in his home and his mind.

His shoes hit the end of the aisle, and he looked back up at the shadow, but it had disappeared. No one had returned to the store, and the outside world had turned dark and grey, a blur that told nothing.

His head whipped around as he stayed inside the aisle, shirt still lifted as a mask over his mouth and nose, his arms grasping at the shelf as his small heart pitter-pattered and palpitated against his chest as it rose and fell.

A hand clamped down on his shoulder and he jumped, the air leaving his lungs as he spun and came face-to-chest with a very tall elderly man.

Eren sighed a breath of relief. The smell was gone, people we’re back in the store. The air didn’t feel as scarce.

The man’s chilled blue eyes surveyed him as he collected himself.

“Mornin’ Mr Smith. Eren! There you are, where’d you go?” Came a call from beside Eren, where Mikasa and Jean had emerged from the shadows aisle. As they spoke to the elderly man, Eren tip-toed towards the aisle and peeped around it. No shadowy figures in here.

“Eren?” He started again and spun to meet his sisters strikingly familiar silver eyes, their colour sending goosebumps over his tingling skin. Eerie.

“Are you alright Sparkles?” She sifted a tender hand through his hair and rested it on his shoulder.

“I’m good! Everything is very fine!”

He squeaked out as the three older people stared down at him, their eyebrows raised in comic surprise at his yell. Mr Smith’s brows were a neighbourhood inside joke, their size being the inspiration for many, many, stories.

The large blonde man grunted in Eren’s direction, “I was just having a word with your sister here,” his eyes softened as he spoke and they drooped when they landed on her, “Would you like to come help me with some land-work next weekend? I’ll provide your birthday with plenty of nibbles as a thank you.”

Mikasa gave him a small smile as he looked down at Eren, his mouth opening to add “my back just isn’t what it used to be, unfortunately.”

Eren had agreed to help out the old coot with a disgruntled “yeah, I’ll help ya.”

He didn’t like the look the strange guy had been giving his sister.

They’d gotten home without any further issues or instances, and the next day passed much the same, the seemingly busy presence seemed to have made other plans that day. Maybe terrorising twelve-year-old’s had lost its fun. But that night, as Eren crawled beneath his crinkling covers, his hair still dripping from his bath, a dream crept up on him. A dream that flickered like the broken light in Armin’s basement, and very similar to the fluctuating hall of bright lights that pumped and beat like his palpitating heart. 

He stood up from his crouch on the linoleum floor and watched as a figure stood with its back to him, the light of the setting sun outlining their silhouette. He blinked, and the person had turned to him, a pensive expression pasted on his face as the sun continued its descent, highlighting the reeds and glittering against the water that reflected into his eyes and sparkled against the metal of the stores shelves.

He blinked again. The person had inky black hair and eyes that shimmered like the raindrops that fell on a quiet, rainy day. Gently pattering against the ground and the windows as the sun hid shyly behind the clouds; dropping onto the floor and silently filling the store with rainwater that flocked and flooded and pooled around his bare, muddy, feet.

He blinked upwards once again, and the sky before him now was the image furthest from the look that reflected calm and rain. It stood proudly with purple and pink hues, orange splashes and gentle blue drips. It was exploding with colour and it sat behind a man with a beaming smile and crinkled eyes.

Eren stared into the pearly whites of the man’s sharp briery teeth as he blinked again, the slow shutting of his lids created a murky mirage of colour before they parted again.

The man was gone, and the sun had set.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading :) I hope you are enjoying it so far. Please let me know what you think


	4. His Hands were wrapped in Earth, encased in Muck, as cold as Ice.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eren hears a story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Lynching, death, homophobia in Part 2.

# Within The Reeds

### His hands were wrapped in earth, encased in muck, as cold as ice.

#### Part 1

The week had passed quickly. When Monday came, Tuesday passed. When Wednesday left, Thursday arrived but was gone as swiftly as the rest.

With each day’s finish, came the beginning of the night. Where nightmares raked his mind of its thoughts, and his feelings became a messy maze of wires and cables that had too many ports.

He dreamed constantly of the man. The one with the inky black hair that flickered in the wind and the fading sun. Always the same images replaying, over and over in his mind until it was all he could conjure when he attempted to think.

A bump jolted him as Armin’s grandfather’s truck bumbled and burped down the gravel road to their school, where the dreary sky dripped down on them through humid stretches of foggy air.

His eyes drifted over the rippling waves of plants as the breeze picked up and sent their feathery ends fluttering in the wind. They reminded him of the man’s hair, drenched, dripping, as hands held him down underneath that filthy, disgusting water that filled his mouth and his lungs and choked him until his throat swelled and blistered from the coughing.

That was always how he woke. Coughing, spluttering; vomiting up whatever had laid itself to rest in his stomach. He was always left with the thick taste of mud coating his tongue and his lips before he attacked his teeth with a feverish hand holding a toothbrush that had seen better, gentler, days.

A second bump, and Eren watched as their car tumbled its way into a spot that had almost been usurped from them by a woman with wild hair and children who’s screams could be heard through the closed windows of her car. She looked half mad.

Eren felt a film travel over the surface of his eyes as he watched another family ponder around their much cleaner car. His eyes followed them as two kids jumped from their parents car with curling grins and kissed each of their parents on the cheek before sprinting off into the school. He couldn’t understand the bubbling sense of anger that built up inside of his stomach while he was watching them. He felt furious.

The feeling confused him as he loved his parents, he didn’t understand where this rage, no, jealousy, had burst from. It joined the now ever-present sense of paranoia that had been building within him all week. It was beginning to feel like a pot that had been left alone on the stove too long, bubbling up and over, spilling over its edges and down its sides until all of the water had fizzled away and the pot had begun to burn from the flame.

His feet hit the sweating tarmac as he slipped from Grandpa Arlert’s ute, the worn silver paint glaring at him as he turned to grab his bag.

The elderly man peered down at them from the drivers seat, watching over them with hawk-like eyes before he made direct, and intense, eye contact with Eren. The blue of his eyes gleaming as his dry lips smacked together.

“Make sure you boys ‘ave a good day, alright?”

His gruff voice spoke softly through the whiskers of his moustache and over the sound of the engine. The boys nodded to him before slamming their doors shut in unison and bounding their way over the grass and into the schools grounds.

Eren walked with his head down, brown hair bobbing as they passed a long stream of ants. They carried small crumbs on their backs, with spindly thin arms covered in microscopic hairs carrying them and their bounty to the nest. He wondered where the nest was.

Through the grasp on his brain and the tightening in his chest, he flicked his eyes to his friend, watching as the shorter boys blonde bowl cut bounced as he walked. Where his golden strands glittered in the dreary morning sun.

“Hey Armin?”

Eren’s brows drew together as he stared at the grass, their small feet sped and crunched along as they made their way closer to their first period classroom.

His friend peeked up at him through his fringe, the light-coloured hair catching what was left of the sun’s rays shining through the cloudy sky. Pensive blue eyes watched him as they reached the sporadic layout of buildings.

The question pinched at the tip of his tongue as it pressed against his grinding teeth.

“Never mind.” He huffed and looked up at the gathering clouds, their shadows covering the school.

Each students head bobbed and bounced as they lined up outside the class. Voices ringing out excitedly, yelling about their games and their books and shouting and yelling and screaming. The image intruded on his mind before he could prepare himself for it. The feeling of choking on the silt-ridden water. Hands grabbing at his arms and his legs and dragging him deeper until the water was filling his lungs and his head was being plunged under the water. It wasn’t his head. Eren took a deep breath and drifted his eyes shut, his head leant against the brick wall of Ms Hanji’s classroom.

The noise sailed away to the background of his mind as he focused on taking a deep breath in. Deep breath out. Deep breath in.

A warbled sound hit his ears but Eren focused only on the drumming of his palpitating heartbeat. When his eyes fluttered open again, they slowly ambled their way over the foggy schoolgrounds in a haze. They made their way to a small group of teachers, sipping on coffee mugs and chatting outside of one of the administration buildings.

He felt the coils constrict around his chest as his eyes groped the fuzzy air behind the assembly of adults, where the shadows seemed to be sticking to even with the sun drifting overhead, filtering through the clouds.

The sun disappeared behind a particularly large cloud and sent shadows over the entire area from where Eren stood, to where the teachers continued prattling.

Even with the sky full of dark grey clouds, the thick humid air swallowed them as though it were a sweltering summer day.

His eyes stayed trained on that spot. Where the shadows continued twisting and twirling until a human-like figure brought itself forward, as though it had stepped through a sheer curtain.

“-ren!”

A sharp pain on his arm brought him out of his reverie. Small fingers had grabbed at his bare skin as he’d glared down at the teachers.

“Ow, Armin what was that for?”

The smaller blondes brows drew together, and his lips pouted in a huff, “you weren’t listening to me! Ms Hanji said to go into class now.” 

A pulling sensation appeared at the base of his skull as he stepped into the room, a slight chill running down his spine as the air-conditioner hit him. He sent one last look outside as the door closed shut behind him. The shadows were gone.

It wasn’t until they were halfway through the class, that he felt the familiar chill run down his neck, like an icy droplet of water had fallen from the ceiling and aimed specifically for him. His back straightened like a ruler, his head twisting around the room before getting the same feeling prickling down his spine and landing at the bottom of his back, going directly into his stomach.

He faced the front of the classroom, the silence building and layering until he could hear nothing, the space around his body shrunk and shrank until all sense of sound bounced off of him. The sound of the teacher excitedly ranting was reduced to just her lips moving violently. The girl to his left tapped her pen viciously, Sasha he thought her name was, and still it made no noise to his ears. He heard a strange tapping sound, like his mother’s fingernails when they drummed against her wine glass.

He looked to his right, where the glass of his classroom looked out over one of the recess areas. The window had marks spread over its translucent surface, where the cleaners had furiously wiped at it in the early hours of the morning.

His eyes watched all of it, waiting for the moment when he would see something, anything, out of place in the scene he felt forced to watch.

It wasn’t until his eyes took in the reflection of his classroom, where all of his classmates faced the front of the room, watching intently as Ms Hange explained something to the rest of the class. His eyes fell on himself, where he felt himself jump in fright and shrink in fear. His reflection wasn’t looking back at him. The rancid, thick, stench of the mold, algae, and rotted flesh of the swamp filled his nostrils until his breath was coming out of him in short gasps of air.

He watched himself writing furiously on his textbook. Scribbling with the intensity of rage. His brows were drawn together and his eyes gleamed silver.

He looked away from the window and slowly drew his eyes down to his desk.

Ink splattered the table and his book, and the pen was curved in an odd direction. He read over his notes, thinking he’d been writing down what the teacher had been ranting and raving about as she drew diagrams all over the whiteboard. In a penmanship that didn’t belong to him, all Eren had written down was,

Here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here

Until the pen had burst, and the words had become scribbles and droplets all over his page.

He gripped the pen harder and whipped his head upwards so fast a pain shot out from the space between his neck and shoulders.

He dropped the pen and closed the notebook on his page of scribbles, hoping to block out the memory of it happening. His lip trembled as he pressed it between his teeth. The swamp still filled his nostrils and the humid air wrapped him in a sweltering blanket. A sheen of sweat appeared on his face and he furiously wiped at it with his hand.

His breathing continued to speed up as he heard the slow wet slap of soggy shoes squish and squelch their way towards him. It was the only sound filling the room apart from his haggard breaths and the things choked huffs of air.

He felt as it stopped behind him, its dripping clothes of shadow reaching an arm up that had a hand wrapped in earth, encased in muck, as cold as ice, extended with cracked fingernails dyed black and yellow from the marshlands depths. He felt locked in place, the droplets of sweat making their way down his neck and drenching his shirt.

Before the thing could make contact with the back of his throat, a hand slapped down onto his shoulder and all of the noise of the classroom clamped onto his ears as he began hyperventilating.

He could hear the muffled sound of his teachers voice saying his name before his vision began spinning and he blacked out.

#### Part 2

The blunt blade of the shovel shoved down into the stinking gravel filled mud that surrounded the elderly man’s house.

After Eren’s blackout the day prior, he’d woken up sometime later in his bed at home. An icepack had slipped off of his bed and laid in a wet heap on the floor.

He’d felt fine enough that night, even though the adults of the house had still fretted and bumbled around him to make sure he didn’t relapse. Even Jean had passed him a blanket and had been the one who took him home from school while he was out cold. Eren had the trickling of a thought tell him that maybe Jean wasn’t as bad as he’d wanted him to be.

He wiped at the sweat dripping down his face and pushed his hair out of his eyes.

They’d been digging away at the muck built up around his porch for around an hour. He didn’t see how it could get this bad, but he guessed that being old definitely had its deficits.

The tinkling of ice hitting glass echoed over the porch to where Eren stood bent over the dirt, the setting sun glinting off of the sweat rolling down his tanned skin. A light sunburn dusted his nose and cheeks.

He glanced upwards at the hunched and elderly Mr Smith as he carried a tray towards him and placed it on the balustrade, passing down a fizzing glass of something Eren hadn’t tried before, but it smelt sweet.

Sitting down on the stairs to the porch in a sweating heap, Eren took a gulp of whatever the elderly man had given him and looked out into the marshlands, the setting sun setting the landscape aflame in multiple shades of purples and oranges, yellows, and pinks.

He watched an ant crawl over his muddy knee. It’s skeletal arms and legs tickling at the strings that had frayed from the tears in his jeans.

“Hey Mr Smith?”

The older man grunted around a dripping beard.

“Has anyone ever drowned in the swamp?”

He spluttered and coughed, took another swig from his glass, and then heaved a deep and heavy sigh.

“Once, that I know of. A young man, around… fifty years ago.” The man’s lips smacked together as he hacked, wheezed, and spat a glob of phlegm onto the earth at the base of the wooden stairs.

He scratched at his chin through his scraggly beard and continued.

“The headlines ‘adn’t been able to say how it happened, but anyone and everyone knew anyway. It hadn’t been an accident.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“Well Eren, it’d been a murder. Plain and simple, clear as day. He’d been meeting someone, and they’d run into some trouble. Oh, he was a lovely man he was. All pale skin and black hair, he caused quite a ruckus with the ladies.” A small smile tugged at his lips as he spoke.

“They’d met at sundown, him and this other person, and it would’ve been fine ya know, if that person had been a girly, or if they’d just been friends and tossed rocks at that shining marsh water. But he wasn’t, and they’d been seen. Havin’ a kiss among the tall reeds, hoping that it covered them enough, but it hadn’t, and it didn’t. A group a’ uptight teens with sticks up their asses and snivelling noses, spotted em’ and started throwin’ rocks, and the young man, oh, he ain’t take nothin’ from no one, he began tossin’ the rocks back at em’.”

As Mr Smith spoke, Eren’s mind conjured the image of the black haired man, face contorted in anger and pain and fury, while a river of blood spilled down the right side of his marred and injured face, the setting sun much like today, set the sky alight behind him.

“But the other man, oh he was a coward, he’d shrivelled in on ‘imself. Tried tellin’, no, beggin’, for the other man to stop, to let them throw their rocks and their words. To just get it over with so they could run, run as far as they could. And he’d looked at ‘im, face all pulled together and bleedin’ and he’d said ‘no, we don’t deserve this,” and he’d continued. The other man, that weak excuse of a human being, had run. Hid among the bushes and the bugs while the teens cornered ‘im.”

Eren watched as the man with black hair blinked the blood from his lashes, heaving against a split lip and an aching head, shaking from his toes to his nose as he watched with blurred vision, as the teens stalked closer. Like a lion and its prey.

He could still hear their insults, their words thrown at him like spears and rocks and words that echoed over the water and his mind. His body hurt, his chest ached, his heart was shredding itself to pieces as he watched his faceless lover’s back recede into the reeds. His thoughts were a mess, tossed around him like forgotten autumn leaves.

He stepped back into the sinking mud that sucked at his boots and his legs and muck that slurped as he tripped and slammed onto the ground, the back of his head hitting the earth with a bang. He laid there for a couple seconds, his vision doubling as the world spun, until he felt a leg connect with his ribs, a foot kick out at the side of his face. He curled in on himself, shielding himself from their hits, blows, and punches and their words and their taunts. Their jeers and their contempt. Their rage and their hatred. Their disgust was palpable on his tongue with the sharp iron taste of blood and dirt.

His teeth ground and smashed together until slivers and chips cracked off of his molars and he choked on them, on his own teeth. As his lip swelled and his skin yellowed, split and bled and bruised. He coughed up his blood from broken bones and injured organs. He hurt all over, from his toes to his nose.

His black hair was filled with mud and blood, his silver eyes were that bloated and swollen it was questionable they’d existed on his face in the first place. He felt the hands grab and grasp at his arms and his legs and his pants and his shirt as they began dragging him, he couldn’t tell where they were heading. He couldn’t see.

Mr Smith spoke from his ground teeth and his thick tongue, “It was murder, Eren. Anyone could see that if they’d just looked. But no one did a thing.” He chewed on his trembling, thin lips. The lines on his skin were aging his face as he spoke. The gleam was gone from his sky-blue eyes that reflected the fading sun. “No one lifted a damned finger. Not even me.”

His feet dragged on the ground and caught on rocks and sticks and reeds and weeds, and reeds, oh the reeds. How they pulled at his skin and his clothes, as though they were the only thing reaching for him, grabbing at him to stop the teens from lugging him towards their destination. The reeds, their spindly arms wrapping around him and whispering in his splintering ears that it was going to be alright.

“I can still hear him screaming, Eren. His cries and his wails as they beat and dragged ‘im. Down into the swamp. Away from where I sat, hands clamped on me ears as though it’d stop whatever was ‘appening if I couldn’t hear it.”

Eren saw as a younger Mr Smith sat curled in on himself, kneeling on the roots of mangrove trees as his hands clawed at his hair and his palms shoved into his ears. Silent tears crawling down his skin as he sat there, immovable.

Pale skin met murky water, where the man had begun kicking and yelling belligerently as his brain connected with the reality of what was going to happen. He screamed and he pulled at their hands as he fought with all the strength he had left, and then some more that he didn’t, and he gargled on the silt filled depths as they pulled him deeper. His shirt was drenched, his knuckles scraped as he grabbed at the strangers’ arms, his words choking and strangling as he inhaled a tight breath and gagged on the swamp. On the mire.

Fingers swaddled his throat, clamping down hard as they pushed him further under the water. Where he choked and coughed and spat. He vomited water to inhale more. He choked on his blood and his bones, and he choked on the water and the mud. The earth and the muck.

He kicked and he fought, ground his teeth, and tried to suck in whatever oxygen he could get when his cracking lips met the surface of the splashing marsh. The reeds hugged him from beneath the waves, welcoming him apologetically.

He was in so much pain, his throat was swelling, his bones were broken and ground into dust as he continued fighting until his limbs stopped moving, spasming slightly as they lay atop the water. He didn’t hurt anymore.

He was back in his own body, his heaving breaths leaving shaking lips as Eren quivered in his place. Mr Smith had still been talking, muttering under his breath.

“What happened after that Mr Smith? After he was… after he…”

A sniffle came from the direction of the slouched elderly man, the energy leaving his body as he stared up at the clouds.

“What ‘appened? Well, the cowards father ‘appened, that’s what. When his son had come home, covered in mud and out a’ breath, coughin’ up a story about some teens draggin’ a man into the swamp. A man he’d kissed. After hearin’ that, well, there was no questionin’ it. He wasn’t gonna let no dead man pull his son down with ‘im. So he did what any good Samaritan would,” He spat the words out like they offended his mouth by speaking them, “he covered it up. Paid off the police to not look into it, said some choice words about gays and they agreed with ‘im. And the story was buried beneath the mud his bones were laid to rest in.”

Eren held his empty glass between cracking knuckles, his elbows rested on damp knees. He glared at the ground before him and he stared at his earth filled fingernails. They yellowed at the tips and darkened around his skin.

“Mr Smith, what was his name?”

“His name? Well, his name was...”

Smith’s face contorted into a miserable, melancholic frown. The years of age and pain showing through as his wrinkled skin drew together. His voice choked on his words.

“Levi, Eren. His name was Levi.”  
  



	5. I Fall, and the Swamp Reaches for Me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone, here is the fourth section. I hope you enjoy it :)  
> TW: Vomiting, paranoia, dissociating, let me know if you'd like me to add more.

# Within the Reeds

### I Fall, and the Swamp Reaches for Me. 

#### Part 1

It had started with the cold. His bath water turning icy, a sharp breeze cradling him when his small feet carried him outside. Strange for a humid season. The feeling of short, heavy, frosty, gasps of air tickling at the fine hairs on the back of his neck when he sat at the dinner table, a forgotten fork stuck in his food. His mind stuck in the marsh. 

It had started with the eyes. Eyes that watched him from upstairs, from downstairs, from his porch and from the dense reeds that danced in whistling gusts of humid air. 

He'd seen what was watching him, he'd caught what was chilling him. He'd seen Levi. 

Eren had begun asking his sister to check every shadowy crevice, and every dark nook. He would beg her to see what the noises outside were, and he'd plead with her when they sounded from within his room. 

It had continued with the nightmares. 

He would wake up in the dead of night, toes curled and pressed into his mattress, his body unable to move. A pressure would build on his chest. A panic would rise up his throat. 

Those shadows would warp and wave, creating dark figures that would crawl along the walls, carrying with them moonlight eyes and the stench of the swamp. 

It had continued with the flowers. 

The jug of dying flowering spurge sat atop the kitchen counter, it's petals browning and burning. The water had turned brown, the stems sagging. 

But at night, they bloomed. The crinkling leaves and petals would soften. They grew. 

They appeared at every corner he turned, growing between floorboards and around the porch. His family never saw them. 

He sat in the tub. In his bath, his wash of soapy water that ran through his fingers like liquid strands of hair. He'd choked on the hairs that grew from the swamp into reeds that had wrapped around his throat like fingers and strangled him until he was purple and blue and bruised and bleeding and dead. That wasn't him. That was Levi. The dead man. 

The shampoo slipped between the crevices of his nails as he scratched at his itchy scalp and at the fine curls of his hair. The repetition of his fingers clicking against his skull softened the red rim around his dry, drowsy, green eyes as they closed. 

A sudden sharp snap ceased the motion of his hands, the suds falling down his neck and down his arms and down his face as a fierce frosty breeze followed the sound of tinkling crystals into the room and raised those fine hairs along his arms and grew the bumps along his skin. He couldn't hear the rain as it pelted against the outer shingled walls, nor the sounds of his ma, pa, and sister chittering and chattering in the kitchen downstairs. The pipes in the room groaned an almighty sound before croaking and silencing. The window frame creaked. 

His eyes were squeezed shut, the soap gathering in pits made from lines in his skin around dripping lashes. They itched and scratched at the skin around his nails. The breeze turned every inch of water on his skin cold. A horrid squelching noise squeezed its way through the window, catching on the frame with the sounds of bones snapping and groaning and croaking and spluttering as it slid and slipped into the room from the open window. He could hear it making guttural moans as it slowly smacked and slapped its sodden feet against the tiles. the boots it had worn had slowly rotted away, leaving behind the tattered remains of soggy leather as it stretched against the floor and shivered its way towards him. 

He felt the drenched material of its rotten, mouldy clothes crawl into the tub as its feet stepped in with him. It's skin turned the water an icy cold. Like the thin, frosty crunch of undeveloped ice that grew from the earth and into the marsh during winter. 

The tip of his dry tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth. His lips puckered and went to open, the fear sliding beneath his skin and settling around his heart like a snake constricting against it as it beat and beat and beat against his trembling ribcage. His lips parted to form the word that made up the creatures name. It's living name. It's title for who it was when it wasn't this. As his mouth parted, the soft touch of a rough finger pressed against his lips. The harsh putrid smell of old mud, rotten plants and fungi, and decaying flesh wafted into his small nose as he felt it move and lean closer and closer until it's greasy stiff hair brushed his forehead, sending a shiver through the tiny figure of the small boy sitting in the porcelain tub. 

"Shhhhhhh," the thing hissed against the shivering, twitching skin of his face. It's breath hitting his cheeks along with spittle and the overwhelming scent of dead things. He could smell its breath. It reminded him of the rat, dead, along with his discarded socks and forgotten toys. It's stench wafting through his mattress but was now breathed into his face as he kept his hands tightly tangled in damp, brown, hair. 

He heard and felt the snap that followed, with the sudden clap of thunder outside, and the rain trickling in from the window as he sat shivering in the now frigid temperatures of the water. 

He was alone again. 

The banging against the bathroom door ceased as a hand twisted open the doorknob and his sister found him sat there, his hands glued to his head. 

"What happened Eren? You've been in here for hours! I was bangin' on the door. We told you not to lock it!" His sister's voice rang against his earlobes in repeating squeals of ringing, "You're turnin' blue!" His fingertips had pruned, and his lips were the colour of lavender as he shook within himself, his hair still full of shampoo. 

"K-k-kasa, somethin' was in here," he stuttered and quivered around shaking lips as she slammed the window shut and pulled the plug. Her hands pulled a towel from within the bathroom cupboards and wrapped it around his trembling shoulders, taking in the damage and thanking the heavens that the rain was facing the other side of the house, only leaking down the wall and around the window frame. She noticed a mark within the water beneath the window and pressed a finger to it, coming away covered with slick, dark mud. 

"It's alright Sparkles, it's gone now." 

The night dragged as he laid in her bed, eyes locked on the ceiling drowning in shadows, jumping and twitching at any that moved. At any breeze that pushed, whistled, or creaked their way through the house. At his sister as she rolled over in her sleep. 

He tried to think of good things. His Ma's cooking, his father's glasses. Memories of Mikasa when she'd been adopted as a violent 15-year-old. That had been eight years ago. He'd been five. When she'd been calmer, she'd lifted him into a superman as he laughed and flew and dived into a pool of bright, blue water that resembled the colour of Armin's eyes. The tenseness in his shoulders softened as his body calmed and he turned and curled into the small curve of his sister's back, drifting off to sleep quietly. 

He dreamt of Levi again. 

This time, it wasn't the Levi of violent sunsets and beaming smiles. 

He turned and twisted with the smoky entrails of the fog, eyes half-lidded and rotting. The remnants of black and blue bruises that leaked into green and blue skin that tore and stretched over muddy muscles and crumbling bones that reflected the grey tones leaking down from the overcast sky. Levi was disappearing into the murky layers of fumes and mist, in vapour and water. 

He stretched a thinning hand of rotting flesh towards Eren, where its earth covered fingers reached and curved softly, caressing the space above Eren's head, caressing the tendrils of hair that grew atop his skull. 

Eren looked up at the thing in front of him, the thing that had been Levi. With its hollow grey eyes reflecting the pain and the grief and the horror of being trapped for decades within a rotting body that stank and hurt and grabbed at him and tore at his rotting clothes and stopped him from moving on. Eren understood. 

Levi was tired. He just wanted to move on. He needed Eren's help to do that. 

His hand curled around Eren's chin softly, stroking the plump living flesh of his cheek. 

His inky black hair tangled and grew until the world was black, and Eren plummeted down, down into the murky depths of the marsh with the soft caress of gentle fingers stroking his hair as he was pulled into the disappearing nothingness. 

#### Part 2 

He felt the hair move from his eyes and jumped awake. The cold fingertips running through his hair were only his sisters. 

Eren blinked his eyes and he was at his school, the cool breeze washing over his face was only from the car stopping as Armin's grandfather cut off the engine. He was beginning to feel like time was mixing together. It was becoming a blur. He couldn't remember this morning. 

He looked down at Armin's body as it bounced, and his hair shimmered in the dim sunlight as Eren clambered out of his grandfather's ute. 

He could feel the eyes on him as he moved, but they were no longer looking at him in wanton need, in hunger. He could now feel the sadness, the pain, the grief, and the longing. It penetrated the thick air between them and tightened his chest when he breathed in. 

"Are you alright Eren?" 

Armin's question carried over heavy air that warped around his ears like he was standing far away from him, moving about like it had danced on the wind that moved over a tranquil body of water. Levi watched him. 

His own voice sounded as though it came from another's mouth. "I'm fine, Armin. Just tired." 

He felt like he was sitting on his own shoulder, his mind full of the feeling that it had been filled with cotton between his brain and his skull. Like there was no room left for him. 

They stood in front of Ms Hanji's classroom. He couldn't recall the walk there. He felt like he was moving in slow motion, that his laughs were another's voice, and his words didn't belong to him. 

Her voice rang out and he was sitting in his seat. Sasha had swapped seats with Armin today. His blonde locks falling over his face as he wrote in his textbook diligently. What a good student he was. 

How young. And soft, and supple and delicious. 

He felt himself get sucked back into his own body, where the sound of the classroom shot through his ears and his breath left his trembling lips in soft gasps of air as the ravenous hunger left his mind and his stomach. His glassy eyes stared at the desk in front of him as he grasped it with tight, white knuckles. 

"Armin?" 

The blondes head shook as he heard his friends faint voice whispered from beside him. 

"What was that Eren? You say something?" 

Eren gripped the plywood harder. 

"Armin, do ya believe in ghosts?" 

Armin tapped a pen to his chin, something Eren used to feel jealous over as he was one of the only ones in the class that hadn't gotten a pen license yet. He couldn't seem to feel anything for that anymore. He felt so tired. He felt old. 

"I don't think I do. I mean, I think I'd have to see it with my own eyes to believe it." 

Eren nodded and let go of the desk, his quivering hands falling to rest in his lap where they picked at his nails and his skin. 

He heard Armin begin talking before his voice receded and muffled and the rest of the room fell into silence. 

Levi was back. 

He could feel as his body mimicked the prior week's motions. Slapping and sliding against the linoleum floor before standing behind where Eren sat. His hands digging red crescent moons into his palms. 

His eyes bore holes into his open notebook. Where they flicked in the fan-made wind to the page where Levi had written. 

Here. He was here. He stood behind Eren with the same cold breath that smelt of the swamp. 

He reached his hand, the same one as the last, and extended it to Eren's neck. Extended it to Eren's neck where it spread its fingers of muddy earth and gripped the back of the sweating flesh. Cracked fingernails digging into the soft, tan flesh of Eren's where where it plunged its rotting fingers deeper into the skin. 

He couldn't breathe. 

His breaths came out in short strangled huffs of air. The fingers pressed down tighter. 

It didn't feel like Levi anymore. The hunger was back. 

He gasped and inhaled a breath of air as sound returned and the hand disappeared from his throat. 

A small hand was rubbing circles into his back as Armin whispered beside him. 

He gave a weak nod from a pale face, the imprint of Levi's hand still holding on his throat, cold, and raw. 

He placed his head into his hands, rubbing at the temples and avoiding the back of his neck. Afraid, that if he touched it, the hand might still be there. 

He heard Armin call to the teacher, but his head was spinning, and his throat was constricting around itself. His stomach turned and lurched as the teachers thundering footsteps pounded against his head. Boom, boom, boom. Eren could barely concentrate on his surroundings, the only exception being Ms Hanji's feet hammering against his skull. 

A large, cold hand planted itself on Eren's shoulder, and he looked up into her hazel eyes, before lurching forwards and vomiting all over her expensive suede boots. 

Large voices with no meaning behind the hubbub that fell from violent lips and fingers pointing towards warping doorways threw themselves all over the small student as he retreated into himself after emptying the contents of his stomach all over the teacher.

All he could feel were the hands that kept touching him; the hands that grabbed at his shoulders as he walked down the otherwise empty halls and the hands that held him up when he tripped on his own feet.

He wanted those hands to disappear.

_Stop touching me. Stop touching me. Stop touching me._

The voice from his brain as the words mixed and muddled and he felt his eyes becoming droopy as he slipped on the floor, his feet struggling against the linoleum.

He could feel the sound around him warping and waving as he tried to stay focused on reality, on the way Sasha’s shorts rustled as she walked, or how Armin’s shoes squeaked from the fast pace he walked to keep up with the taller students.

He tried to lift his hands to cover his ears, to get rid of the disorienting feeling of noises being reaped from his eardrums and placed on the floor several hundred meters back.

“Eren, we’re here.”

Armin’s voice came from underwater, gurgling and rippling from beneath bent reeds and lilypad’s that bristled as the swell shivered beneath them.

A pair of eyes stared back at him, first blue like the sky, and then dark and black and muddy and grey and storms and stormclouds and his brains whirled and swirled and he woke up on the floor staring up at the school nurse who had lifted his shaking legs onto a chair and had his head cradled in her lap, barking orders to Armin and Sasha to bring him water, food, his bag, his limbs, his eyes, his head, oh his head hurt. Stop talking. Muttering soft whispers of “Sweetie, are you alright?” as his head continued swirling and he fought the urge to vomit as sweat shone across his forehead and dripped down his neck over fresh bruises that pinched at his skin. He surrendered and his bile landed in the plastic bag of a bin that had been placed unceremoniously by his spinning head.

He felt hands wrap around his feet and for a second, fought the urge to kick out at the people who had lifted him from the floor and placed him in a bed that felt like cement, first hard as bricks and then soft, not yet dry, pulling him in as he sunk and sunk and then he was swallowing the water that someone was carefully holding against his chapped lips. He was so thirsty.

He slipped into a restless sleep and dreamt of the storm, swirling and snapping around him as it threw rain against houses and small boys who stood in a line around a lake, the water swishing and lapping at the shore as reeds shot out of the ground and the water rippled as more grew from the sodden earth beneath that murky liquid. He watched as eyes turned to him. Eyes from the shore, from the boys, from the water, from the reeds. He made eye contact and felt the cold sense of dread grow from his chest and down his spine, into his legs as it washed over him and pulled him beneath the water, where he fell, and the swamp enveloped him with reeds that wrapped around his legs and pulled him down beneath the waves that licked at the feet of blank eyed, drowning boys. The plants were wringing their way up his body and around his neck, cutting off the airflow as it joined the bruises spinning their way around his throat.

He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe, why can’t he breathe, there’s something wrapped around his throat and its cold hands, muddy hands, dirty, filthy, leaking, swollen hands that grew from the earth like reeds and wrapped around his throat so he couldn’t breathe.

He looked into the lenses of a young man’s glasses, face warped with anger and rage and disgust. The revulsion and hate so palpable on his expression that Eren could taste it. It tasted like the mud and the earth and the reeds of the swamp.

He was awake and staring into the silver eyes of his sister, so similar to that of Levi’s. His own were full of hot tears as he took a gulp of much needed air and grabbed at her dishevelled clothes, his small arms barely making their way around her back as he pulled her towards him, the warmth of her body healing his freezing, shivering frame.

“Take me home, Kasa.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope everyone liked it, I apologise if the writing seems to be feeling less connected? My mental health has taken a beating recently so I've usually only been able to write in sudden bursts of things that kind of feel like panic attacks :) Life is strange


	6. Kaleidoscope Eyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Graphic depictions of violence, death, drowning, please let me know any others that need to be added :)

* * *

## I Follow the Flowers that Lead between the Reeds

The small, compact waves lapped at his feet; the swamp water drifting around his heels and between his toes as his body crouched over the sand, and his small hands played in the mud.

"Happy Birthday to you!" 

His eyes peered up through thick, heavy lashes at the two women sat on the porch, their hands occupied by glasses of washed-out red cordial. The sweet scent carried on the breeze towards him. The ice clinked against the glass as they giggled and laughed. Talking and distracting themselves as the tiny frame of the young child looked up at them through dense lashes and plump cheeks. Pale green eyes watching them as he grabbed handfuls of mud, and sticks, and rocks, and reeds.

"Happy Birthday to you!"

He wiped his earth ridden hands on dirtied knees, eyes peaking up at the overcast sun with squinted eyes and watched as a hefty fly flew its way over him. Buzzing as it went. 

He looked out into the murky water and watched as small white flowers grew delicately before him, quickly and silently; the sound of the stems creeping their way into the air while the petals bloomed softly, only heard by his ears.

He stood from his spot and stepped towards it with heavy feet; small lips pulled taut in a pout that was only capable of toddlers. More flowering spurge grew beneath his bare feet as he stepped into the mire, the mud, sticks, rocks, and reeds that pushed themselves between his toes.

"Happy Birthday dear Eren!" 

He followed the trail of flowers as they bloomed, sprouted, and sprung from seemingly random spots between the reeds that perceived him with watchful eyes as they grew tall like towers over him.

The water billowed out around his waist as he stepped. Chubby fingers grabbing at the flowers as they appeared in front of him.

He watched as a head of dark hair lifted itself gently from the water, the bridge of its nose touching the rippling surface as its lids slowly opened. 

He made eye contact with silver irises, sparkling, and quivering like the water it had risen from. It's hand lifted and slowly came out of the water, palm up, and opening a silent invitation to Eren as he stood in the water and giggled at this new, strange, stranger. 

He clapped his hands together and paddled forward; the water hit his chest. 

The person moved back. Eren surged forward, his limbs now frantic. 

He stopped giggling, his hands and feet kicking and struggling as he was pulled down by the weight of his body, by the weight of his clothes. By the reeds that grabbed his arms and his legs and wrestled with him to join them. To join them amongst the mud, and the sticks, and the rocks, and the reeds. 

By the light of eyes that gleamed and glared in the shadows that overcast the sun. 

"Happy Birthday to you!" 

From Within the Reeds, irises of frightening silver hungered for him in the last moments of his fading sight. 

# Within The Reeds

### Kaleidoscope Eyes

#### Part 1

Unnaturally pale skin, sunken eyes, chapped lips. The reflection staring back at him was one he wasn't familiar with. It was him. Maybe?

A shaking finger

lifted and touched the mirror. Fingerprints and splatters of toothpaste. Green eyes, bruised skin, silver eyes, broken bones.

Eren felt himself sitting atop his shoulder, watching through kaleidoscope eyes at his untethered body as it went about its tasks.

It brushed his teeth; it combed his hair. His body had been cleaned by hands that belonged to him but were borrowed by someone else for the moment.

His hands sifted through his wardrobe, flicking through the materials until it grabbed at the first black thing that touched his fingertips.

The cotton was soft, tickling the pads that were attached to the tips of his fingers as it stroked, gently, the sweater they had found.

It paired it with grey jeans, a grey shirt, a black sweater.

He looked like he was dressed for a funeral.

In his mind, he watched what controlled his motions with feigned interest, his legs swinging back and forth as he perched on his own shoulders.

He watched as he stepped down the stairs, the sounds muffled and muddled until it sounded like an echo. The echo of a rock hitting water. Ricocheting off of the ripples.

His mother ran to him, arms open and coddling the empty shell that stood before her in its dark arrangement of funeral attire. His sister watched from the kitchen, warm smiles, and soft eyes as she looked at her partner.

His father stood from his spot, a hand making contact with the back of the person stood in his skin. His hand felt like ice.

He was turning thirteen today.

Eren blinked and he was seeing through his own pale, green eyes. He clenched and unclenched his fists, glaring at the ground and the bugs and the flowers that bloomed around his feet while he stood there, covered in foliage that no one noticed. 

He shook hands upon hands upon hands, each one covered in filth and dirt and earth and mud and filth. His teeth ground against each other as he shook another hand, this one frail, the sagging skin sticking to his own as it yanked and pulled at the lines on his hands. His face was stretched into a grimace. 

Peoples voices rang out around him as he tried to concentrate on his surroundings. He felt tired, and grumpy, and hungry, thirsty, angry, and just so tired. 

He wiped a hand down his face as he sat down on the stairs, his parents continuing the greetings for everyone who had arrived. 

Looking from his spot, he watched as Armin came bounding towards him, blonde hair bouncing around him as the hot midday sun melted everyone under its rays with dry heat and humid air. 

"Happy Birthday Eren!" 

He plastered on his best smile for his best friend, but the dark circles and deep pits beneath his eyes gave away the exhaustion he barely attempted to hide. 

"Are you still feeling sick?" 

He rested a cool hand against Eren's forehead, the bigger of the two relishing in the feeling as it cooled down his molten brain. 

"Just a little, I'll be alright. Wanna see what I got this year?" 

He pasted excitement on to his features, but the exhaustion leaked out of his body like a leaking faucet drip, drip, dripping into an overflowing; exuding from him as sighs that took the entirety of his muscle system to exhale. When he breathed, the centre of his chest pressed into an aching pinprick that left his heart fluttering in a way that made him feel nauseous and dizzy. 

Unfocused eyes pointed an unfocused finger to all of the out of focus presents he had been presented as a way to celebrate and remember the beginning of his thirteenth year. he wasn't sure he'd been able to tell people what he got from memory. Pointing helped. 

His eyes blinked slowly as he mumbled to Armin about books and clothes, his eyelids closing as his mouth formed the words that fell from his lips. He blinked again, and suddenly he was sitting in a chair at the dining table. 

The window outside told him the sun had almost begun to set. Where did the time go? 

The lights in the house were all switched off as he looked around the room. His seat was sat to the left of the head of the old wooden table, where his pa stared at him with eyes hidden behind gleaming glasses that reflected the orange flame of the candles sat perched in the icing of the cake. Glasses. Glasses that looked down at him lovingly, pensively, with wonder, with rage, with disgust. His glasses glared at him with the hatred of an exploited army and the disgust of one singular person. The putrid, rotting disgust of one that could cause so much pain. Hurt. His eyes burned and he glared at the table in front of him. To get away from those glasses. 

Glasses hiding kaleidoscope eyes that had lived hundreds of lives and personalities that had loved and lived and hated and killed. 

He could see Levi watching him. It's silver irises shining through the flames of burning candles and melting wax that glistened in the rage of fire as his family sung and chanted and shouted and screamed and clapped until Eren's chapped lips shaped an O and he blew out the flames that danced in liquid magnets of molten grey eyes that glared down at him from a pale face reflecting off of the cold, white icing that glimmered with perspiration in the moonlight that mirrored the glass of the windows as it shone into those silver eyes. He blinked up into them as he officially turned thirteen when the flames went out. 

The lights appeared again as people muttered and whispered and questioned him for his wishes and his wants, his needs, he needed, needed something. He was hungry but he couldn't figure out what he was hungry for. He peered at his family and his friends; Sasha, Armin, children, kids, food... He could eat them. 

He shook his head of its thoughts and picked at his plate of cake with a small fork that glinted off of the window as Levi watched him from the deep recesses in the corners of the room where the shadows were thickest. 

He picked up his plate and stepped outside, the security door closed gently behind him. He sat on the porch and looked up at the darkening, lazy sky. 

He felt someone sit next to him and watched through tunneled vision as his Pa dropped his body weight and fell beside him on the stairs. He watched through telescopes for eyes as his pa spoke and spoke and talked and muttered and yelled and silently watched the clouds with his thirteen-year-old son's body. Eren wondered if he knew he wasn't there. 

Eren's body's mouth opened with a voice that wasn't his as a tingle went up his spine. The voice was familiar, but only in the sense that he'd heard it before in a distant memory, or maybe from a background conversation. 

"Grisha." 

His mouth said his pa's name. 

Grisha's face widened in shock, eyes bulging from their sockets. Eren's body had said his pa's name, it wasn't normal. Pa was Pa. Grisha was the name Levi had said with Eren's own tongue. 

His face was pulled taut in confusion, what was wrong with Eren's voice? Why was he calling him by his name? His thoughts were everywhere. Scattered around him like blood splatters and thrown rocks. 

He laughed it off and threw his head back. 

"Just 'cause you're thirteen now doesn't mean you can stop calling me pa, Eren." 

Eren stared up at him with sunken, clouded eyes. His face paled and his lips cracked. 

"Why did you throw it?" 

Eren's voice came out of his throat thick, gravelly; like a forty-something-year-old who had smoked since they were ten. The damage to Levi's vocal chords cracked and crackled as he spluttered out words through swollen and struggling throats. 

Grisha swallowed around what had stuck itself to the inside of his throat. "Thrown what Eren?" 

"Why'd you throw the rock? Why did you yell?" 

Eren's body had turned to look up at the sky, his feet swinging lazily as the cake sat, forgotten, in his lap. His bodies silver eyes flickered to his Pa before looking back at the clouds. Swinging as lazily as he was. 

Grisha looked nauseous. A hand was held against his pursing lips, eyes open in abstract horror as he tried to wrap his sodden mind around what was happening. How did Eren know? How did he know? How much did he know?" 

"Why did you throw the rock Grisha? It didn't involve you, why did you throw the rock?" Eren's body stood, standing over his fathers slumped frame as his eyes burned with a rage that had been left steeping for decades. The cake fell, squishing itself between the wooden splinters on the stairs. 

Grisha looked up into his sons face, then at his eyes. The silver that reflected back at him was so reminiscent of Mikasa's. The child, the girl, the woman he had grown to love and cherish and had so often used as a shield to cover his own crippling guilt. 

"Levi." His lips mumbled as his eyes widened. 

"I looked after her Levi; you can't touch Eren. I looked after your blood, I paid back my dues when I took in your grandniece after her parents died. You can't touch him!" His voice was slick with the gruff sound of tears as he stood from his spot and pointed a finger in the small child's face. 

"I looked after her and I loved her, I made up for what I did. Why are you here? Why are you doing this to me? I'm the one who has suffered through this. I lived with the guilt and I made up for it when I adopted her." Eren's round face looked up at his Pa's, the grief and the guilt mangled it, tangled it together with glasses that gleamed off of warm, flickering lights. They glinted off of the setting sun and the blood that pooled on a rock held in deft fingers as he rotated it. He needed to get a good angle. 

"Pa, why did you kill me?" 

Grisha held his face in his hands, his sobs barely contained by those deft fingers that held loose skin and pulled at his pores and his glasses as he ripped them from his hair and threw them to the porch. 

He held Eren's face, those green eyes looking up at him as though his dad could give him all of the answers. His brave Pa, who fought monsters under his bed when he couldn't sleep. But he couldn't fight this monster. This ghost that had crept back through the splintering floorboards and the dripping faucets and the guilt that leaked from his eyes and his mouth as he sobbed into his hair and on to his son. 

Eren looked up at his Pa, the guilt warping his skin in lines and creases that dipped between his eyebrows. 

His own eyes began watering. He didn't understand what was going on. He was so tired. So exhausted. 

He reached an arm and placed it on his Pa's shoulder. 

"It's alright Pa, Levi's only visiting. He'll be gone soon." 

He stood from his crouched spot and turned into the house, pushing past Eren's bewildered Ma as she followed after Grisha, the worry creasing her forehead. 

Eren looked out into the swamp, where the reeds waved and beckoned. 

#### Part 2

His hollowed steps scraped and scuffed against thick wooden steps as he silently marched down the gravel path that went out from his families property. It sat on the edge of the swamp, where it slowly sank into the mud and the muck and the earth. 

He stepped silently, his shoes crunching the rocks and the stones beneath his soles as he walked away from the house, and towards the welcoming reeds. 

The night had arrived quickly tonight, where the days humidity had covered everyone in a thick blanket of sweat, the nights breeze drifted softly, careening over everything as it covered everything in an ominous gloom. The silence of the night cut through everything. Even the loudest cicada was muffled against the calm of the dark air filled with shadows that watched over him as he stepped, and stepped, and stepped, along a gravel path that seemed to be endless. 

Until he stopped. 

He had walked until the house was a small blip in his sight. Until the sounds of his family calling his name had receded to be nothing more than background noise, joining the cicadas and the crickets as they sung, danced, and screamed. 

He dropped to the floor, slowly removing his shoes and his socks, placing them gently to the side of his crossed legs. He closed his eyes and listened to the soft melody of the swaying reeds, the cattails that joined them swirled and swung to the rhythm made from rippling water and gyrating plants. 

His body felt as though it were moving through layers of foam, his eyes blinking leisurely as he pondered the depths of the swamp. 

He wondered. 

He stood from his spot on the gravel and walked to the shoreline, his feet stepping into weeping ground that bled into tepid water. The wet regur soil crept between his toes like liquid fingers that welcomed him with a beckoning hand. 

He watched, transfixed, as the stars reflected the water of the mire. He stepped forward. 

He felt as the water dampened the bottom of his jeans. Clinging to his skin like the sweat that clung to his brow in the humid air of summer. 

He took another step forward. 

A hand clamped onto his shoulder, wet, covered in earth and decay and stinking of the mud that lay at the bottom of the marsh. 

"I was waiting for you Levi. Were you waiting for me too?" 

It grinned down at him, its shuddering and shivering teeth clicked and chittered as its smile stretched over rotten skin. It muttered into his ear in cracking tongues and swollen words, whispering into the dazed boys ear as he watched with blank and vacant eyes, at the marsh. 

"It's okay Levi. It'll be alright now; I can take you home." 

The creature curled over him; bristly teeth bare in a smiling snarl. It's robes of shadow fluttered around him like mist, covering and surrounding both of their figures as Eren reached up and took one of its gnarled rotting hands in his own. He could feel the maggots worming their way beneath Levi's skin as he grasped his fingers. 

Eren's eyes looked up into the creatures sunken silver irises that reminded him so much of his sister. Levi's grandniece. 

"You would've like her Levi." 

He brought his small, soft, living hand up and placed it gently on one of the creatures concrete cheeks. Cold and rough. 

A smile tickled the edges of Eren's mouth as he turned to the marsh. He feet stepped forward once again, bringing Levi hand-in-hand as flowers grew and bloomed at their feet, the reeds welcoming them into their waves. 

The silence of the mire thickened and grew and enveloped the two figures as they sloshed their way through the shallow water. The distant echoes of his name were lost on the breeze as it passed overhead. 

Levi trudged forward, passing Eren as he struggled against the weeds, rocks, and plant mutter that stuck to his feet and his calves and pulled against his jeans. His rotting fingers grabbed at the flesh of Eren's hand, yanking him forward through the muck and the waste as it built up and tangled their way around their limbs and their legs and their torsos until Eren's lower half was completely submerged, his bare feet stuck in the wet mud and the damp earth that covered the floor of the swamp. 

His face had contorted into a crazed grin, twisting and pulling at the skin of his face until it hurt. Levi's own face hadn't changed from its own smile. His bloodshot eyes leaked yellow and green as they stared forward in wonder at the dark swamp. It looked as though they were in their own little world. Separate from the reality that the night-time swamp was hot, filled with bugs, and bites and scaley creatures that watched from within the reeds as Eren was pulled forward, his feet no longer on the ground but paddling and splashing against the silt filled water. His smile strained and struggling as his lips tasted the filth that floated above the waves, his arms frantically pushing and beating against being pulled under. 

Levi stopped suddenly, turning and facing Eren as he struggled to float. His smile widened as he reached a hand forward and caressed the top of Eren's damp, brown hair. Softly, gently; Levi's yellowing eyes oozed liquids as the rotten smell overwhelmed his nose and he huffed, out of breath from the effort of holding himself up. 

A push against the top of his head and he was thrown under water. His mouth gulped down an urgent brought as he struggled against the hand that held him. He scratched and clawed at the mouldy skin that fell off of brittle bones like the loose bark of old trees. 

He thrashed and threw his body against reeds that wrapped around his ankles and the weight that held him down. 

The weight disappeared and Eren flopped onto the surface of the water, his red-rimmed eyes filled with panic-induced tears as he gasped and coughed and choked. 

He turned in a circle, his mind realising he'd been dragged to the middle of the swamp, where the water was several meters deep and the plants and flowers grew around him like giant walls that encased him in and refused to give him a sense of direction. 

His arms and legs paddled and beat against the water as he attempted to swim towards a staggering group of tall reeds. 

He could feel the eyes watching him, like a bird of prey flying overhead. Watching for the slow, injured prey that had fallen behind from the pack. 

He could feel him from the plants he swam towards, from the sky above him with silent echoes of whistling winds, and from beneath the water as he swum, and swum, and swum with all of the strength left in his limbs. 

His hand reached out to grab at the thick stem of an overgrown cattail, his lips screaming for his Ma, for Pa, for Mikasa, for life, for purchase, his tears thickening his throat as he coughed. 

Familiar cold fingers wrapped around his ankle. 

He grabbed and pulled at the plant as Levi's grip grew tighter, pulling at him as he screamed and screeched and yelled and squabbled against him. 

His ever-pouring eyes filled with fresh, salty tears that leaked down his cheeks, mixing with the mud, and the muck, and the earth and the blood as sticks scratched at his face and rocks scratched and cracked the flimsy keratin of his nails as they fought against Levi's grasp as it pulled and pulled until he felt like his leg was being torn from his body and the pain pushed a blood-curdling squeal from his mouth that left his throat open and torn. His fingers slipped from the edge and he had just enough time to take a large gasp of air before he was pulled under the waves of the swamp once again. 

His eyes squeezed shut as he felt pressure build in his ears and a pain shoot through his head as he was dragged deeper. He felt the hand slip from his leg and his eyes slowly opened in the murky currents. 

The night sky barely lit the water as he floundered and twisted his head around, panic overriding his body as the instinct to not breathe kicked in, his brain screaming at him to get air. 

He flipped and turned and lost the way up in the darkness of the marsh, his eyes struggling to focus against the microscopic creatures and dirt that wound their way beneath his eyelids. 

He could feel his lungs tightening as he begun running out of air and continued sinking slowly. He blinked and watched as his own vision yellowed and dimmed, his energy waning as he slipped deeper into the water. 

He wondered how deep the swamp was. 

His mind clicked as he continued sinking. He knew the way down, all he had to do was swim the opposite. 

The adrenaline kicked in and his feet jumped into action to swim upwards in the water. He remembered watching a diving channel when he was younger. Swim slowly, or your lungs fill with gas. 

His brain felt like it was falling apart like an old sponge and his eyes burned from the water. The adrenaline kick he had gotten was quickly burning out. 

He felt his arms and legs grow heavy as they slowly stopped moving and drooped in the water. He imagined it looked like he was floating through space, gently being thrown in a vast expanse of nothing. 

The burning of his lungs went away as his body convulsed and inhaled a gulp of the filth ridden water. He coughed and spluttered beneath the waves and bubbles and continued inhaling water through his mouth and his nose and it burned and hurt, it hurt so badly and Eren was so tired. The inhalation felt like a giant, damp cotton cloth was stuck in his throat and nostrils and scratched and lacerated the insides of his skull and neck. His body shook as he continued swallowing water and he watched as his vision dimmed against what little light was supplied by the night's stars. 

A shadow crept into the last of his sight and he watched as Levi's silver eyes watched him, only a meter or so away from where Eren continued sinking and convulsing. The pale skin of Levi's face stood out against the deep greens and dimming greys as Eren blinked slowly. His lashes filled with earth and dirt and bubbles. 

The burning in his lungs dissipated and Eren almost smiled, he felt so nice and warm, and so tired. 

So very tired. 

The last of his vision closed on the sight of Levi moving closer, his eyes pensive and his chilled hand holding the colder skin of Eren's chin. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading :) Please let me know if there are any issues with grammar, or if you liked the story :)) The last section will be put out sometime this between tomorrow (02/11) and next Sunday (08/11); it will be an epilogue. 
> 
> Thank you for reading my first horror story :) I hope you enjoyed it.


	7. Epilogue: The Child

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is the very last section, the epilogue. TW still apply. This entire chapter was written and edited within 30 hours. This sections almost 6000 words long. I attempted to write Levi as creepily as I was capable of in my 20% brain state, as he would be pretty insane for someone who was alone, dead, for fifty years :)  
> I hope you all enjoy it, and that you enjoyed this story too.

# Within the Reeds

### Epilogue

#### The Child

The first time I saw the child, he had been no more than four or five; a child, by all definitions.

After years, and years, and years; years of wading through a shallow everlasting tidal flat that echoed in an ongoing room of fog; a room that tinkled a sharp metallic sound whenever my feet splashed against the water. After years of being trapped here, in this place of no walls but no escape, forever set on a path with no end; I saw this child. 

He had arisen out of the heavy tendrils of fog, splashing in the reflective pools that transformed into mud when they fell from his dark, chubby fingers.

I sat and watched him for a moment, just a moment. It wasn't an overly long moment at that, but it had been long enough for this bright green-eyed child to turn his small, round head with those bright green eyes and stare straight at me. 

He saw me? He could see me? This small child with too much fat on its bones that formed a double chin whenever it opened its teething mouth to giggle and gargle and gaggle out nonsense upon nonsense as its rotund feet clambered towards where I sat in the shallows. 

My heart had found its place lodged somewhere in my neck, while the rest of its beating ricocheted around the rest of me. I had started crying. This small creature with its inability to do much more than stumble through the water had reduced me to hiccupping tears. 

He'd crawled closer until his small body had begun sinking into the floor, unable to fill the small expanse of water. 

I reached my hand forwards and caressed the soft side of his warm cheek, touched at the gentle curls that fell from his head. I could feel him. 

I lifted him from the ground and out of the water, my sniffling nose leaking as I'd placed him in my lap. It had been so long; so long since I'd felt the warmth of another human being. 

My body leant forwards, enveloping him, cradling him against my chest as my arms wrapped around the small form of his warmth. 

Hands reached down out of the fog, pulling him from my hands and from my arms until he was gone, and my fingers were left with the remnants of the snug, dry, warmth that broke up the cold environment I was confined to. 

I'd stayed seated there, cross-legged with shaking hands placed in my lap; watching, as two pairs of legs carried him away from me. 

Why had they taken him from me? 

My hands wrapped themselves around my torso as I stayed stuck to my spot in the watery flats of this never-ending room. 

_Why had they taken him from me?_

The second time I saw him, he was older. He seemed to be around 10, playing with a small blonde boy whose name started with an A. Their shadowy translucent figures would run circles around me, me who stood there in the cold with the giggles of children that rebounded off of the directionless echo-chamber surrounding us. 

Whenever I had tried to reach forwards, to reach a hand of desperate fingers, fingers desperate for touch, they would run, run further than I could catch up to them. The closer I got, the further their figures moved away. 

It had felt like chasing the end of a rainbow. Sometimes, you can see it, but you can never catch it. Never feel it. 

The third time I saw him, it had been a while after, not quite as long as before, but long enough to take me to the point of desperation. I needed him, I needed him to see me again. I needed to touch him.

I sat beside him while he sat in his bath, his small hands scrubbing at the tanned surface of his unblemished skin, his fingers tangling in the drooping curls of his damp brown hair. 

My head lay against the porcelain edge of the cool tub, a heavy hand dangling down until a single fingernail tapped at the surface of the warm water. As the ripples shimmered their way towards the child's side, a shiver rolled down his back, his fingers still entangled in his head. His teeth chattered against the tepid air of the bathroom and he stood suddenly, forcing me to roll back on my heels as he stumbled and slipped towards one side of the bath, his hand reaching for something outside of what the fog allowed me to see. 

"Can he feel that I am here?" 

My thoughts raced as I sat on my knees, watching as he pulled at something with his eyes squeezed shut. A smash resounded against the assumed tiles of the bathroom and Eren froze, his body shaking where he stood. 

Another voice, feminine, reached out from the wisps of fog and hands wrapped a towel around his small frame. Echoes of comforting mumbles that wouldn't translate into my skull. 

As the child stepped over the side of the tub, his feet fell through the floor and his body slumped forward, turning into water vapour that puffed out from the ground as he slammed into it noiselessly. 

He was gone again. 

I wandered, for a time, stumbling over nothing with heavy feet filled with the loneliness of time. 

I'd questioned my death for the first decade or so, or what I thought to be a decade. I couldn't quite tell. Maybe he would show me. 

I continued wandering, wondering when I would see the small frame of the green-eyed boy, if the fog would let me see him again. 

My thoughts that had once been consumed with the confusion, the fright of death, the acceptance, had now been overrun by the image of the small brown-haired child that had simply done nothing but exist in a space where I was able to see him, interact with him, possibly touch him. 

What would that skin feel like? The same as when he was smaller? No, it would be different. My mind ran with the possibilities of skin, touch, hunger, skin. I wanted him, I needed him. 

If I walked far enough, perhaps I would see him again. 

So I walked, and stumbled, walked, and walked some more, until the sounds of my steps echoed off of a solid something in front of me. 

I reached a hand forward, the tips of my fingers sliding down the slippery surface of perspiring glass. Blurry figures moved around behind the fogged mirage. 

Wiping my hand across it, the images froze, and I stood before a window looking into a room where the small child sat, pressed against a faceless figure with long black hair. The blue light of a television reflected off of his face. 

His green eyes turned to the window. 

My hands pressed into the glass harder, pushing against the boundary that separated him and I. If I could just break this glass, I'd be with him. I could have him. He'd be mine. 

The loneliness had consumed my mind and my will long ago, and now that he had been placed before me, I starved for him.

His mere presence broke the prison of this everlasting echo-chamber and my hands continued to slam against the glass, my eyes never leaving his small body. 

As both of my hands smacked into the window frame, it evaporated into waves of soft vapour, cascading down over my feet and then my hands as I fell to my knees and curled into my chest as the child and the room disappeared from me view. 

"Bring him back!" I'd screamed into the nothingness before me, cradling my own weakness as I sobbed through my fingers and slammed them as fists into the water covered floor that cradled them ever so gently. The frustration, the anger, never being able to relieve myself of these feelings that came with being within one's own company for so long was its own kind of prison. 

The water before me shimmered and moved, wrapping, and warping around itself and shooting forwards like a speeding bundle of water snakes, racing towards a non-existent finishing line. 

The water climbed its way up the fog to form a glimmering rectangular shape; a door, not thirty metres ahead of me. 

The wood formed in weaving streaks of wooden string before a thick frame encased it, and the door edged open to reveal the shining eyes of the small child. They stared, pensively, over the wasteland of water that I continued to crouch, bewildered, amongst the ripples. 

He was so close. I could get him. I could grab him. He'd be mine. I could take him and grab him and hold him and his warmth would be within my arms. He could be mine. 

I jumped, stumbling over my feet as I rushed forwards, running, and sprinting at him until I was standing face-to-face with a slammed closed door. My fists made contact with the hard, solid wood. 

You can't get away from me. You're mine. 

I listened intently to the soft, short breaths hidden behind the door and rested my thumping head against it. I could hear and feel the receding echoes of his footsteps and spun to face the water as the door fell into nothing but puffs of air. 

"You want me to have him! Show him to me, give him to me!" I'd yelled into the vast expanse of echoing nothing. 

Voices repeated back to me, feminine, soft. Whispering amongst themselves as their words twisted and rung around me, my brows furrowing as I tried to make out the words they had muttered into the wind. 

"Somethin's wrong with him..." 

I glared at the floor. 

"Wrong with him?" 

Their voices strained against the gentle puffs of fog as their words whispered and gathered in unintelligible piles. 

"Somethin's wrong with Eren." 

The word, the name, it shot through my ears and ricocheted around my skull, eating at the mass of organ within it until it was all I knew. The name of the child. I could feel it. This was his name. 

"Eren."

I tasted the word in my mouth, feeling the heavy weight of my relatively unused tongue as I repeated it to myself. Whispered it, yelled it, screamed it from empty lungs until my throat felt as though it had been torn to shreds. 

I knew his name. 

The women's words continued swirling around me as incomprehensible mutterings, eating away at the deep insides of my ears until my nails had begun picking at the follicles and tearing the strands. 

Images swished around in front of me, a large metallic object shimmering its way through the fog with legs surrounding it. 

Their words repeated in my mind. Wrong. Off. Different. They splayed and pulsated against my brain, barely legible enough to understand but enough to offend. 

They thought something was wrong with Eren? Nothing was wrong with him. He was a child; he couldn't have something wrong with him. He was wonderful. He was Eren. He could see me, and I could see him and, it was just how it was supposed to be. Why couldn't they understand that nothing was wrong with him? 

They didn't see him the way I could, they couldn't feel him how I can. 

The anger bubbled inside of me until my fists had risen and slammed into whatever had appeared in front of me. My hands shifted through the mirage until it fluttered and floated off as wisps of water vapour. 

The belligerent yelling had started afterwards. I stared down at my pale palms. I'd done something. I'd affected them, wherever either of us were, I'd affected them. 

A smile pulled at the size of my mouth, stretching the skin in painful dips that creaked into the creases where smile lines were meant to be. 

I followed after the retreating figure of the small child, who I assumed was Eren, the smile still jerking at the burning crevice between my lips. 

I could affect his environment. I'm getting closer to him. 

I watched as he climbed back up onto the stool, with me standing in front of him in the midst of a floating benchtop. Crouching down, I looked up into his face, twisted with annoyance as I watched through planted elbows. 

I wondered what could have irritated him. Did he want me to take him from these anguishes? 

I looked up into those ever-thinking eyes and snarled a toothy grin. He always looked like this, pensive, ever thoughtful beneath those soft brown curls. 

"Eren." 

Even as he disappeared, the word was enough to send my mind into a haze as thick as smog, filling my mind with the soft full feeling of cotton. 

I could affect his environment, what if I could affect him? Touch him? Smell his scent and cradle against his warmth. As I had done once before when he was so small, small enough to be held and carried. 

He appeared again in front of me, sitting behind a car door as it moved speedily along a gravel path made of water droplets. I stood and watching is it turned in the same spot, flicking up pieces of liquid gravel that dispersed into grey droplets of shimmering water. 

His eyes turned to me and I grinned. 

I stalked up to the car, one hand reaching upwards to touch the metal before the image wobbled and shifted, transforming itself into a maze of shelves. 

Where was I? 

Shadows moved around me in high speeds, walking through me and around me until I was dizzy from turning on the spot and stumbling from the dark figures. The water splashed around my feet as I spun. 

Where was I? 

My spinning stopped when I heard a sharp intake of breath. 

Turning slowly to my left, I watched, transfixed, at the sight of Eren squishing himself against a shelf. His normally translucent skin was fading in and out of focus. Shimmery and transparent, focused and filled. Like looking at a reflection atop water. 

He had wandered into my place. 

Eren was here.

My breath left crumbling lungs in quick exhales that pained the space where my heart was seated. 

I could feel the tears threatening the corners of my eyes at the overwhelming joy of having someone this close to me. 

I began walking along the aisle, my pace becoming faster and faster and more frantic to reach the end that felt like it was kilometres ahead of me. Eren was slowly slinking along the shelf, staying in step with my own sprinting feet as they ran. I was getting nowhere, but the sheer amount of happiness I felt at having him close was all I could see. 

I finally shot through the end of the aisle, coming to a sudden stop, and spinning to face him. 

The store was gone. The aisles were gone. Eren was gone. 

"No. No, no, no, no. No!" 

I screamed and swore and cursed and slammed my forsaken hands into the ground, glaring at the cushioned surface until my eyes were rimmed red and I felt the tears slip slowly down my cheeks. 

I just want him. Why is it so difficult to get him? Just give him to me. 

A pair of feet planted themselves in front of me, hazy through the tears in my eyes. 

I wanted to hug him. To pounce at him and grab at him and never let him go. He was mine. 

Eren's head was facing towards me, eyes looking through and over me at something behind my back. I studied him closely. The small spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks. The small glint of golden strands in his curly hair. The straps of a bag sat snuggly against his shoulders. 

I blinked and turned to look at what had caught his interest, and a fist sized lump seized the interior of my throat. 

A family corralled their children together. Loving parents and loved children and soft touches and gentle hugs. 

The memory came, unbidden, before the anger. 

Everyone had gotten their share of love, of kindness. Of loving words and kind words that hadn't been spat back in their face as they stared up into the immovable eyes of a stony parental figure. 

His fist shaped bruise had spread over my skin as he leered over me, the smell of alcohol rolling off of his skin in waves of putrid stink as he stumbled. He leant against the wall of a filthy den we had once had the misfortune of calling home. 

What I'd do to be back there. Amongst the whores, and the prostitutes, and the drugs. 

My uncles feet stepped through Eren, pushing his watery image away while he looked down at me with hatred in his eyes and filthy words on his lips. 

Filthy from the moment of my birth. I was covered in filth. Drenched from head to toe in filth and earth and mud and dirt and I was filthy. Disgusting. He ogled me from his height advantage, and dripped words from his chapped lips that strung saliva like a spiders web that dribbled over me until my skin tingled and I gripped at it, scratching, and scraping, and scratching at the skin and the muscle until my bones had replaced the surface and still my nails continued to dig in. 

My fingers had made their way into my skin as his knuckles had made their home in it, and his words had made their home in my head. 

I rocked back and forth in the corner of a hazy room filled with smoke and fog and water that drenched my greasy clothes where I sat and rocked. 

The sound of children echoed over the image of my uncle handing the small, twisted spoon to my waiting, shaking, shivering, quaking fingers. 

My head shot up, inky strands of oily hair fading from my sight as I stood from my spot on the wet floor and marched through the shadowy figures and stepped into an open area filled with noise. 

Eren stood leaning with his head against a wall, his lovely green eyes closed against the misshapen collection of sounds echoing around him. 

They opened against heavy protesting lids as I marched forward, my arms forcing my way through the shadows of people, propelling my body forwards to reach him. 

Just as I made it to the last figure, Eren disappeared. 

Huffing, my arms held each other against my chest, my body still drenched from laying in the shallow pool. 

The noise returned, contained within white walls covered in blank pieces of paper. 

A solitary desk rose up from the waves that lapped at its legs as it beckoned me forwards, my feet moving before my mind could think. 

A single book lay opened on its surface, a pen sitting on its empty pages, where words began lilting and twirling along the paper, leaving behind an inky array of disorganised letters and incomprehensible words. The legible words created questions, begging me for their answers as I watched its stained fingertips spread the ink over the tabletop. 

A question shone through, in what I could only assume was the messy penmanship of a child; Eren. 

"Where are you?" 

My hands fumbled through the pool of ink that was building and building and washing over the sides of the desk and into the water I stood in, filling the foggy landscape, and dying the world black. 

“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here Eren. I’m right here!”

My fingers found the pen, gripping it as the stem snapped and ink continued gushing from its tip made of broken shards of plastic that glimmered against the shimmering black liquid. 

I scribbled on the desk frantically, trying and failing to find the book as I scribbled and scribbled and cut into the surface of anything I could find. 

The desk fell away into the black water. 

I stumbled back, falling into the shallows with ink covered hands and fingertips drenched black. 

And then Eren was there. 

I lurched forwards and tripped on my own feet as I desperately reached a hand forward, dripping fingernails almost making contact with the back of Eren's neck. 

My eyes burned with unshed tears as I paced around the newly blackened landscape. 

I didn't see him for a while after that. 

I could hear his words and other's words being thrown over my head like someone shouting over the echoing surface of a still lake in the dark of night. But I couldn't see him, and all of the words were nonsense, gibberish to my ears. I just wanted to see him. 

A familiar voice rang out over the others, and in my desperation I ran after its echo. 

Where had I heard this voice? Who was it? 

I stumbled and fell when the figure of an elderly man rose up from the floor in front of me. His crystal blue eyes shone as he lifted a tray of glasses in his shaking hands. 

Erwin. 

I sat, transfixed, in the murky water that surrounded me as I watched his frail form wandering around a room of fog. 

He was alive. 

My lungs constricted painfully against my ribs as I sucked in a heavy breath I hadn't realised I'd been holding out on. 

He fell into the fog as so many other images had. 

Why was the fog showing all of this to me now? 

I held my head between trembling fingers and folded into myself. 

And then the sound of gentle drops of water echoed close by. 

Eren had appeared again, sitting in his bath, scrubbing at the same skin as I watched from a window. I pushed Erwin to the back of my mind and moved closer to the glass, content to stay there until the window nudged itself open. 

I stepped forwards, a fiddling finger reaching and tapping against the glass as it opened further. My heart rose up into my throat and beat against my chest as my lungs compressed against all of my organs. 

I clambered into the room. 

Eren's eyes were squeezed shut, his small form shivering as I stepped over the side of the tub and sat myself down with him. 

I felt so happy. It fell off of me in waves of contentment and I wondered if Eren could feel it too. I didn't want either of us to say anything, I just wanted his warm, living presence. 

I watched his face as his lips pinched together, attempting to form words. 

I didn't want to talk this time. I just wanted warm silence. 

His mouth pursed again, and I placed a finger against the soft bumps of his lips, my breath catching at the feeling of warmth another person could give. 

But as my finger left his face, he burst into millions of droplets of water, leaving me alone, again, sitting on the wet ground. 

I was becoming restless, this game of hide and seek was ringing out the anger in my muscles as they ran constantly until my lungs burned and sent slivers of pain through my torso. 

I just wanted him, why was it so hard to get to him? To have him? 

He appeared again, finally, seated on a stool in another room filled with more shadows. 

I glared at his back with thoughts racing across my mind. 

I wasn't going to let him go this time. Don't you know you're mine? Have I not made it clear? 

You're fucking mine, Eren. 

My hand moved before I could think, grabbing at the back of his warm neck, the feeling sending waves of euphoria into my body as I stood there, weak kneed, and trembling against him. 

I could feel my nails digging in tighter, drawing out the high that came from touching his skin, from touching beneath his skin. I want him. 

I need him. 

The hunger filled my lungs as precious oxygen that I needed to breathe as my fingers left him, and I dropped to the floor. Breathing heavily against the fog that wrapped around us as hands grabbed at both of our clothes and our skin. 

I groaned and slowly maneuvered onto my back, twitching as my fingers scraped their nails against the floor, beneath the waves of cloudy water. 

It was like I was high; once again taken over by that sweet, sweet, euphoric feeling as it washed over me in waves that tickled at the curling tips of my toes and left me twitching and tingling against the ground, writhing around like an animal in heat. 

Air left my lips in heavy, heated huffs as I slowly came down, groaning as I rolled around on the floor. 

I needed more. 

I slowly made my way off of the ground and stood on weak, trembling legs. I needed to find Eren. 

A sharp pain shot through my mind as I tried to walk, my hands clutching at my head and pulled at the hairs embedded in my scalp. 

Was it my scalp? I could feel myself shrinking, growing smaller as my body grew warmer. 

I looked up into the reflection of a mirror. A pair of eyes stared back at me, flickering between green and grey. 

I was in Eren's body. 

It was encased around me like a warm suit, snuggled like a blanket that hugged all of the nooks and crannies and crevices of my body. It felt like a perfect fit. 

I wandered into Eren's room, touching anything my fingers came into contact with and relishing in the feeling of feeling as I grabbed at clothes and blankets and wooden frames and metal picture frames that scraped at my fingertips in the most graphic, euphoric way. 

I went back into the bathroom, my hand reaching to touch the reflection that stared back at me with the same sunken eyes that had stared into my own when I would glare into a dirty cracked mirror in the crack-den my uncle and I had called home. 

This was a home. It was warm and the sound of laughter could be heard from downstairs. There was no musty stink of leftover sex. No overwhelming fumes of weed, or opiates, or crack, or cigarettes; there were no smells that would make me gag on the air I breathed when I’d inhale as I woke up. My face planted into an old yellowing pillow that stank of unwashed body odour.

This place had the gentle smell of lavender on everything. The clothes, the furniture, even opening the window to peer out over the swamp; the smell of lavender overtook any bad smell.

I danced on the balls of my feet and began brushing Eren’s teeth, brushing his hair, cleaning the skinsuit that smelt so strongly of Eren that I felt like I was floating.

When I looked in the mirror, my pupils were dilated, growing larger and larger as the fluffy feeling overwhelmed me.

I strolled back into the room that belonged to Eren and shuffled through his clothes, we probably had the same sense of style. We had to; we were so close to each other now.

I was distracted by the feeling of the material, the pads of Eren’s fingers rubbing the sweater I had discovered that also carried with it, the scent of lavender.

The sound of someone calling Eren’s name came from downstairs as I placed shoes onto his feet. I could feel Eren’s eyes on me, watching as I finished tying the laces and moved to the doorway.

We walked together down the stairs and into the foyer, my heart beating against my chest as people rushed forward. I was gifted with hugs and smiles from strangers I had never met yet were so familiar.

A woman stood by the counter. Her black hair in a plait down the side of her chest. She had her head tilted and a soft smile placed between her cheeks. Familiar silver eyes looked down at me with warmth, and love, and wonder.

She looked like my mother.

She had her arm wrapped gently around a man with slanted hazel eyes, filled to the brim with adoration, with love. So much love. 

A hand slapped onto my back; icy cold compared to the warmth of the room.

The blood ran from my face, my heart stopped in my chest.

What is he doing here?

What the fuck is he doing here?

A pain shot through my head and I was slouched down in the shallow water of the never-ending echoing landscape once again.

I stood from my spot and ran, my mind stampeding before me as my thoughts raced against the will of my body.

He was here. He was alive, and living, and he was involved with Eren.

Who was he, to act so familiar with my Eren? A monster from my past, come back to haunt the newfound joy I had discovered in this boy. 

I stopped at the sight of small candles blinking against the fog filtered into my vision, darkening into a black room where the light made from the small flames was just enough to light up Eren's small face. 

And then Eren blew out the candles, his eyes never leaving my own. 

I watched as he stood, his small hand holding a small plate as he made his way around the table with small steps, out past the threshold of the house and into the night. 

I followed after him, trailing his steps closely and as the door closed and Eren sat down, I stepped into his skin once again. 

The feeling of warmth was almost overwhelming as my eyes fluttered closed and my hands trembled. 

The feeling of someone sitting beside me jolted me out of my euphoric reverie and I looked, heavy-lidded, up at the person who had disturbed me. 

"Grisha." 

The word left my mouth as poison the tainted my lips with a bitter aftertaste, my teeth grinding against one another as he stopped whatever his mouth had been running on about. 

He threw his head back and let out a sharp cackle. 

"Just 'cause you're thirteen now doesn't mean you can't stop calling me pa, Eren." 

A lump formed in my throat. My heart beating against my ribcage as my vision slipped into red. 

This was Eren's father. This horrible, disgusting, shitty cunt of a human being was what had created Eren. My Eren. 

My voice tangled in my throat in thick tendrils of words that I couldn't stop, the anger filling me, overwhelming to the point of explosion as I felt the control of my words slipping from between my fingers as they slipped from my lips. The world was blurring around me as rage took a hold and suddenly we were nose to nose, with Grisha yelling about some girl he'd taken in, and how I couldn't touch Eren because of it. 

I just wanted to scream. Eren was mine! I could take him because he belonged to me! The mist had given him to me! 

Oh, and now I realise why. The mist wanted him taken from you, Grisha. I will gladly comply. 

I dropped from Eren's body and fell into the water, my anger thrown through tears that pricked at the dry surface of my eyes as Eren and his _Dad_ muttered to each other behind me. 

Don't worry Eren. I'll take you away from him. We'll be together forever. You're mine, and I will take you from your _father_ with more kindness than he showed when he took away Erwin, when he took away me, when he took away my life. 

The hatred I had built up for this man had grown and grown and grown and festered and rotted around me until it filled my body with maggots and the rotten stench of mould and the starvation, that unfiltered hunger that took over my body and shoved those wriggling worms to the side because all I needed was Eren. All he needed was me. 

I stormed off into the nothingness of the water and stepped through the fog into the humid breeze of the swamp. 

My heart rose, once again, into my throat. If it continued doing this, I'd die a second time from choking on it. 

I looked at the familiar reeds twisting their way out of the water's surface as they twisted their way through my gut. 

I'd died here once. 

I tried to step back from the edge, but a small head of brown hair stood before my vision, making me stop my actions and stare down at him. 

It was Eren. 

My hand automatically reached out and grabbed at his shoulder, making sure that he wasn't going to disappear into vapour the moment I touched him. 

"I was waiting for you Levi. Were you waiting for me too?" 

My name. Eren said my name. He knows me. He knows who I am. 

The smile spreading across my face was addictive, painful in its stretch as the sheer joy of having someone say my name, a word I hadn't heard in a long, long time. 

"Thank you, Eren." 

They were the only words capable of leaving my lips as the smile threatened to split the skin. 

"It's okay Levi. It'll be alright now; I can take you home." 

Eren's hand gripped my own empty one, swinging them both as children often do. His eyes looked into my own, softening as he stared into the greys. 

"You would've liked her Levi." 

As his gentle hand held my cheek, the warmth spread into my skin and the unprompted image of a black-haired teenage girl appeared in my mind. Her knees were scraped, and her clothes were ratty, but the tell-tale signs of an Ackerman heritage bore their mark as she twirled her hair between thin fingers. The black strands contrasting against the bright silver of her irises. 

A hand pulled him out of the dream, and he felt Eren coax him further into the swamp, where the water became deeper and deeper, and the feeling of ecstasy returned to my limbs. I sped past him, with Eren struggling to stay afloat as I flew onwards. 

We walked, deeper and deeper, until the marshland waves became the foggy rooms roof, and Eren slipped beneath the surface, sinking downwards as his eyes closed gently. 

As his eyes opened again, the roof fell away, and we were back in the shallow pools and misty depths of the echoing landscape. 

His body grew still as his eyes held their stare, unblinking, at the swirling skies. 

"Eren?" 

I held his head in my hands and watched as his body relaxed, then fell forwards into my arms, convulsing as I held him. 

I sank to the floor with him and cradled him in my arms, smoothing out his damp hair as his chest hiccupped within his ribs. 

"It's alright Eren... Shh, it's going to be okay." 

We stayed huddled together on the ground, his twitching body held between my arms. 

Eren's body suddenly convulsed, pulling back as it coughed and retched with water falling from his lips and eyes moving frantically around to see where he was. 

"Shh, it's alright Eren." 

Fearful eyes looked up and his mouth gaped open in shock, his mind struggling to figure out what had happened as my hand grasped the small of his chin and I smiled down at him. 

"It's alright Eren, you're with me now."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's the end :) I hope you guys liked it and I hope it answered any questions anyone had, or made more!  
> Would you like any other monster stories? If so, what creature? Would you like to see a different pairing for the main characters next?  
> Please comment if you had any that you would like to see written about! :)  
> P.S. I have also uploaded this to Wattpad under the same name if any of you prefer reading from that app :)


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